Why don’t ecommerce companies offer tinyurl-like services?
June 12, 2008
I just saw someone tweet that they’d received something in the post, and linked to a URL shortener service. It redirected to Amazon. Now I realize that Twitter is a pretty new service, but with mobile rising, I think we’ll see a need for short URLs more and more. Couple that with the slightly extra privacy you get with a shorter URL (someone needs to actually visit the link to know you’re pointing to furry handcuffs, for example), and the mindshare Amazon would keep by having “amazon.com/6hjw89eh9e7hds”, and the extra metrics they’d be able to capture with that (add a user key in the short URL) and this makes sense to me. The top of every Amazon product page would have a “Short URL” property available to cut/paste/whatever.
Someone should embed this in their ecommerce system to acknowledge and emrace Twitter, Plurk and the coming wave of microblogging platforms.
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Entrepreneur, developer, writer, podcaster, teacher, ex-bassist.
June 12th, 2008 at 10:42 am
We are on the fringe of ecommerce at dealnews.com. We have short URLs for all our articles.
http://dealnews.com/234148.html
We use the short format for all our email communication in addition to internal linking. They are great for persistent use like that because they will not change the way our SEO URLs do.
Amazon does offer something along these lines. It is just not clearly offered.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001A3CP3Q
That is as short as it gets though.
June 12th, 2008 at 10:49 am
Good point on the SEO stuff – I was thinking of that as well, that people’s SEO ‘magic’ changes every so often, so if that’s your only URL, it’ll lose permanence.
Didn’t know Amazon offered that. Shortening that even more would be useful, or swapping /gp/product/ for a code that represents my user account would give them more info about who initiates a reference to a product. Basically that’d be a way of tracking influence.
June 12th, 2008 at 10:49 am
BTW, love the ‘moonspot.net’ domain name.
June 12th, 2008 at 11:53 am
ThinkGeek sends out a paper catalog with shortened URLs for their products, for example http://www.thinkgeek.com/a2d2
June 12th, 2008 at 11:56 am
Cool – so I’m not crazy! Just not quite an early adopter like y’all Thanks!
June 12th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
For that matter, I’m surprised Twitter isn’t taking the opportunity to route all those clicks through their server. Could be a revenue source for them…? I blogged about it last week.
June 12th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Is there anyway some could (if they felt the need) find out where the link is going before clicking on it. What if visiting a furry handcuff site would get them fired ?
June 12th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
that’s actually more of an advantage of the method I propose, in that you’d still see the main domain. Amazon may be a bit generic, but if I see a link to bustedtees.com, for example, I probably wouldn’t go there during work (or I definitely *would* depending on the mood of the room!)
June 29th, 2008 at 8:53 am
Was digging around and found this article from Dave Winer exploring the same idea. He’s got more visitors, and therefore more good comments from people. Additionally, I’ve put up http://ewerl.com as a “new kid on the block” shortening service. Lemme know what you think.