Getting Social on the Order Confirmation Page

Getting Social on the Order Confirmation Page

The other day I used a new site to buy a toner cartridge for a laser printer. I’d never bought from this company before but I was impressed with their site and offers and thought I would give them a go. When I finished the order and reached the confirmation page, for the first time on any store I noticed something really effective.

Below the “thank you” blurb and order confirmation number, they presented an eye-catching panel with a Facebook Like Box, Twitter Follow Button and newsletter signup form. I guess I have seen this many times in recent years, but I can honestly say this is the first time I noticed it. And I have to say, it’s a most excellent idea.

It has become a case of plastering social proof over your site and hoping new visitors will click “like” or “follow”. Of course some FB/Twitter savvy users will click the buttons, but on the majority of sites I work with I have to say the “new visitors to followers” conversion rate is minimal. I’d put this down to the fact the visitor has come with the purpose of finding a product, not following your promotions on Facebook.

But, if your could convert the user to a customer, the chances they will want to subscribe are a lot higher, as you’ve already started a relationship between them and your company. So placing a good promotion for your social channels on the order complete page should help build your followers for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and whatever else you’re using at the moment.

So how do we do it in BigCommerce? If we know where to look, we can add our Social Marketing promotion in just a few seconds. For this demo, I’ll show you how to add a Like Box for your Facebook profile.

First things first, let’s get the code we need for the Like Box. Pop on over to http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like-box/ and generate your code. Set up the options how you like, and click the Get Code button. In the code popup, select HTML5, and copy the mark-up that is displayed.

Now we’ll go into our BigCommerce control panel. Click Design and under the Store Design tab click Browse Template Files. Under Layouts in the left hand column of the editor, locate and click order.html. Now somewhere around line 50, you should see the following code in the layout:

%%GLOBAL_OrderConfirmationDetails%%<br> %%SNIPPET_OfflinePaymentMessage%%

Underneath this, we can paste the Facebook code. I’ve added a header along with it inviting people to follow, to receive offers and news. If I was adding this feature to a clients website, I would put a design together which was eye-catching and attractive to the user to entice them into following the companies Social Marketing channels, but this is not a design lesson!

Finally, click save, and now you have a Facebook Like Box presented to everyone who reaches the Order Confirmation page. You could do the same thing with your mailing list, YouTube channel or Twitter feed too.

Hope this was useful, and if you use it and it does indeed boost your followers, let me know in the comments box below!

Duncan

2 Comments on “Getting social on the order confirmation page”

Mike

1st May 2012 at 3:05 pm

This sounds like a great idea to increase social activity. Do you have any tips on getting the actual order contents to display on the order confirmation page in BigCommerce?


Duncan

Mike,

I just tried placing %%Panel.ConfirmOrder%% in the order.html layout; although the panel is read by the template, it looks like the data gets cleared before the page is rendered, so you get an empty summary.

But then I had another idea – the invoice emails contain a summary of the order too, and good news, the snippets from the email works!

So in order.html, somewhere near the top (I’ve placed it around line 50, above %%GLOBAL_OrderConfirmationDetails%%), paste the following script:

%%GLOBAL_CartItemColumns%% %%SNIPPET_CartItems%% %%SNIPPET_TotalRows%%

I think I’ll make a post about this now, thanks for the idea!