It would appear that UK retailers are protected by the ‘Postal Rule’ which effectively means that they can abort any transaction up until the point at which they ship the products. Good news if you have received an Xbox 360 for £33 but not good news if the error is picked up before shipment.
Wearing the SEO hat, I have been struck at how many links I have seen in the past 24hrs to the Tesco website. Given that I read a miniscule fraction of the websites that mentioned the mega deal, I can only assume that this promotion would have led to a massive increase in links to the Tesco site.
Link building is of course vital to the success of any website and has a significant impact on your organic search engine results, so I just wonder if this may have been a clever marketing ploy by Tesco in the lead up to Christmas?
Tesco may have irritated some people but I suspect that nobody really expected to actually get the Xbox delivered to their door for £33. What they will have achieved is massive volumes of traffic to the site, an increased awareness of Tesco Direct and a huge number of additional links to the site, none of which is likely to do any lasting damage…
How to market your website if you are a small online retailer : publish an ubelievably good deal on a hot product, infiltrate some large volume forums and publish the link to the incredible deal, watch traffic and links grow like wildfire, amass a large list of orders (customer profile data) and then walk away from the whole affair citing the postal rule law.
Nothing like a good bit of link bait…
