Total Blue System Ecommerce

Optimise on-line storefront for wider computer monitors

Total Blue System e-commerce websites are being upgraded to a wider screen size, optimized to be 960 pixels wide in their universal navigation bars.

Now's the time to get ready for the Christmas holiday sales season and make optimal use of your selling space. The industry shift to the wider 1024 x 768 computer monitor screen resolution for web shoppers is well established. The 960 pixel width dimension gives the website enough room to fit without horizontal scrolling inside the 1024 pixel width screen resolution, taking into account vertical scroll bars and browser "chrome."

While we see industry benchmarks showing 14% of on-line users were still using the 800 x 600 screen resolution in early 2007, by August our clients e-commerce website usage reports are showing that percentage dropping to about 5%. As measured by Google Analytics, our clientele of e-commerce merchants shows about 50% of web visitors using the 1024 x 768 screen resolution. The rest of site visitors are using even higher screen resolutions (meaning the 5% at 800 x 600 plus the 50% at 1024 x 768 leaves another 45% to higher resolution screens).

Note that the Recently Viewed bar that floats off to the right, showing which products or product categories the browser has viewed during the present visit to your site, will remain on the right side. The placement will be to the right of the 960 pixel width mark. This means there will be some horizontal scrolling for site visitors using the 1024 x 768 page dimension, but that's okay. The Recently Viewed feature (which can be configured to turn on or off) exists as a nice-to-have feature, not critical to the on-line ordering experience.

Work to implement these changes, specific to your custom website design, will be managed within the online project tracking tool you're already familiar with. It'll be treated as a billable professional service for web design and cascading style sheet work that's unique to your website, once you're agreement to proceed is affirmed.

Gain attention and interest in your product, then deliver the details

Feed the appetite of the web shopper who is hungry for information about your products. That's become something of a mantra in our clients' ears this summer, repeated by SEO and merchandising expert Howard Gray. But how much info is too much? And how do you make it all easily digestable in bite-size chunks?

The answer begins with understanding the concept of progressive disclosure, employed by successful sales people down through the ages. But now you have the ability to make immediate use of this concept with the release of a new product detail page template. It's distinguished by it's use of tabs to reveal or hide detailed information about a product or related content on your site. Available now as part of a System Update, the timing of the actual release will be coordinated with you given the need to configure this template in advance and the importance of having given consideration to how best to optimize your catalog.

You can see what's configurable about the product detail page template by going into the Configure section of the Admin Area. Choose the Catalog tab on the left side, and then find the Product Detail configuration options. Here's a few highlights:

• You define the name given to all "tabs" on the page. Default values are presented, but whether or how you use the tabs is up to what's most useful to your website customers. If there's no data associated with that "tab," then the tab won't appear.
• You decide how many tabs appear on your page. Make use of the Description 1 field of course, but you can also use the Description 2 and Description 3 fields as you think best, including HTML code for special formatting.
• Related content now gets more space on the page, adding an incremental boost to search engine optimization efforts. Pick related articles, frequently asked questions, and related product categories, plus upload data files, spec sheets, schematic, or audio files as "supporting content."

Overall, this product detail page template ought give your shopper the opportunity to quickly assess your product's appeal with a minimum of vertical scrolling of the browser window. Then, once attention and interest are present, the page discloses more information as they approach the buying decision.

Look for our contacting you individually to schedule the release of this System Update.

Reduce barriers to collecting product reviews for your catalog

The collection mechanism for product reviews from website visitors used to assume the reviewer will have an account existing with your e-commerce website. This is natural enough for those who have purchased before and created an account. But there remains a barrier for anyone who used the Express Check-out and completed a purchase with a guest account, or who doesn't have account login information handy. A new product review form will eliminate such barriers. Learn more:

E-commerce merchants relying on Total Blue System measure consistently an improved shopper conversion rates for products that have reviews. As a site owner, your efforts to encourage reviews through promotions or incentives will be more effective given the changes summarized here:

• The product review form is now embedded in the product detail page, visible as a "tab" once the "Reviews" text link is clicked if there are no reviews presently approved for this product. If there are approved reviews, then the Reviews tab will appear automatically upon page load and will be the default tab displayed.
• There is no longer a explicit link between a customer account and a product review. There may be such a link re-established via an email address in the future. But in short, the BIG change is that there's no login screen prompt given that there's no tie to an account, leading a would-be reviewer away from the product detail page and delaying the collection of the review.
• The email address field is optional, given that it's no longer tied to an account which requires an email address. You may encourage the email address to confirm the review, follow-up for the sake of a promotional incentive, etc.
• You configure what the "tab" is called. Ideas include "Review" or "Product Reviews" or "Customer Reviews".

By reducing the barriers to collecting product reviews, you will get more reviews. Some reviews will be junk. The intent is to err on the side of collecting too many reviews for now, allowing you as the site administrator to always approve, edit, or reject all reviews before they ever appear on your public website. In the future, it's likely there will be a Captcha authentication element added to the product review form to cut down on bogus reviews.

Note that the timing for the release of this feature upgrade is the same as the release of the new "tabbed" product detail page template.

Show product detail with 'view larger' links

If only shoppers could reach through the screen and feel or smell or taste what's in your website catalog. Until then (wink), bigger, sharper imagery of what the product looks like must suffice. Updates to the "View Larger" photo link from the product detail page will help. Here's a quick summary:

• The "view larger" text link now opens a pop-up window that is larger than before, reflecting the fact that web browsers keep getting wider as computer monitor resolutions increase.
• The pop-up window is now resizable, making it possible to eliminate any horizontal scrolling of the page.
• You can configure what the "view larger" link is called, perhaps preferring "zoom" or some alternative wording.

• If you give the primary photo, or any of the additional photos, a value for the ALT attribute of the IMG tag, that text now appears as the link. So instead of saying "view larger" it may read "Bunk bed with natural wood" as the text of the link. There are benefits here that span accessibility / disability concerns, plus incremental help for search engine optimization efforts.

Here's a final tip:  you can link directly to a larger image of your product by editing the URL of a product detail page. What's linked as a "pop-up" window from the product detail page template can be linked to directly without the pop effect. Here's how:

1. View a product detail page.
2. Add ?template_id=2 to the end of the URL in the browser address window.
3. Hit the enter or return key, to load this new page. You'll see the larger view images displayed in the window. In short, this is it's own page template which you've just linked to directly.

Note: the timing of the release of this template update will coincide with the new tabbed product detail page template.

How to upload records to the Email Marketing Module

Uploading member records in the Email Marketing Module includes these steps:

• Make a full backup of all records and demographics from the "Download Demographics" link before uploading any files
• Record the number of subscribers with the demographic value you're updating before uploading any files (use the demographic breakdown feature).
• Ensure your column headers in the CSV file for upload match the demographic names exactly before uploading (to avoid errors and prevent time spent troubleshooting)
• Upload any CSV files you're working with to the related Project Path messages after completing the work
• Record the number of subscribers with the demographic value after uploading your file.  (This can be done with a demographic breakdown).
• Create or regenerate any filters to be used the with new/updated demographics

A list of email addresses will need to be exported from your order fullfillment software to update records that are not already in your master list.  This export should be done in CSV format, or in a plain text file format with a delimiter if an export to CSV is not available.

The demographic name(s) will need to be added to the spreadsheet. To avoid issues with uploading, the exact demographic name needs to be added to the top cell of the columns in CSV you're working with. Copying and pasting from a web browser may introduce problems, so it's better to download a small number of records from the "Download Records" link on the left navigation to use these exact names.

See the screenshot below for an example of the column headings with the demographic names:

To save time copying/pasting, when selecting a cell to copy to a large group of other cells, click and drag the small black square in the bottom right corner when a cell is selected, then drag it down to fill other cells with the same value as the selected cell.

Depending on what records you are updating, certain options will need to be selected when uploading.

Here's a screenshot of the options when uploading records:

Always select this option when performing any upload:

• Only upload entries with valid email addresses.

If the upload will include new email addresses, normally this will be the only necessary option:

• Only upload entries with valid email addresses

If the upload will not include any new email addresses, also include this option:

• Update information for addresses that already exist

If you are only adding to an existing demographic value that has multiple options, be sure to include this option:

• When updating a Multiple Selection List Field, append not replace

After uploading, if a number of email addresses have been flagged as invalid, you can view this list of addresses, and correct common spelling/typographical errors that will appear after the @ symbol:

Invalid email address examples:

somebody@yahooo.com
somebody@aol.cmo

To confirm that your file upload has updated all of the records successfully, navigate to "List Breakdown" (on the left navigation menu), then click on "Demographic breakdown" on the following page.

Select the demographic that you've updated, and generate a breakdown to view the total number of members with the various demographic values.

Update (regenerate) or create any new filters to reflect the updates and ensure that the number in the filter matches the tally of the demographic value in the demographic breakdown.