E-business Coach Commerce

Upload web catalog's product feed to Google Base reliably

While Google's search engine spider has likely already indexed some of your website's pages, creating a direct product feed for Google "Base" can significantly increase your website's exposure. Google Base is what powers the Shopping area of Google.com, formerly known as Froogle. Now you can more reliably deliver your entire product catalog "feed" to Google Base.

Previous versions of Total Blue System allowed you to directly -- from our servers to Google's -- upload your product feed from the catalog section of the Admin Area. However, clients with especially large catalogs experienced intermittent problems with this process. So it was one-click easy but unreliable. (The underlying problem was a timeout of the server-to-server communication.)

Now we've simplified the process in hopes of eliminating the issue. A new feature to the Admin Area enables you to generate a Google Base product feed file that is downloaded to your computer. You then log into your Google Base account and manually upload this file. While slightly more labor intensive than the previous process, the new method eliminates the timeout problems experienced before.

Understand that you will first need to register with Google Base using your Google Account. Here's an overview of the process for delivering this "free" product feed with Google.

• To ensure that Google always has your most recent product data, we recommend that you upload your catalog to Google Base after any significant update of new products.

Specify products that ought not be included in XML site map

All products in the catalog of your Total Blue System e-commerce web site are now, by default, included in the sitemap generated for your web site. (Note that it is still possible, via the Catalog module of your Total Blue System's Admin Area, to exclude products from the sitemap.) This change means that rather than you specifying every product to be included, you'll do the opposite, the negative, and specify every product that ought be excluded.

Since MSN, Yahoo, Ask, and Google all use the type of XML sitemap generated by Total Blue System, you are assured that these big four will have easy access to your entire product catalog when indexing your site.

• View your site's sitemap at http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
• Learn more about the Site map protocol and the relatively new standard it represents.

While having a sitemap does not guarantee that all links will be crawled, and being crawled does not guarantee indexing, having a sitemap is a reliable mechanism for getting a search engine to index your catalog. Perhaps most important, with the site map specification, you can direct the search engine to the most important, fresh, or otherwise notable pages on your site -- instead of just hoping the spider will crawl those pages eventually. 

Set shopper's expectations of when a product will ship

On every product detail page of your e-commerce catalog there is a short phrase indicating the product's current status, such as "in stock", "back ordered" or "drop shipped". This phrase is a link to the inventory pop-up window, which provides additional information to the customer about a product's availability.The pop-up window contains standard information clarifying the status, such as "This product is currently available in our inventory" for in stock items.

However, in some circumstances an e-commerce merchant using Total Blue System to power their site might want to more clearly communicate to the customer when their desired product will ship. For example, you might might wish to explain that all back ordered items are typically shipped within xx days of order receipt. To allow you to provide this customized messaging, we recently added a Teaser Spot to the inventory pop-up window. (Note: A Teaser Spot is like a picture frame on a page or pages of your site, where you can insert one or many "teasers" to communicate a useful message / promotion / visual graphic.)

For clients that desire to take advantage of this functionality, the Teaser Spot is named "Product Inventory Teaser" and, as with all teasers, can be configured from the teaser section of the admin area: https://[your site domain]/admin/teasers.

By better managing your customer's expectations, you increase the likelihood that he or she will complete the order.

Create product feeds for Yahoo Shopping!, Shop.com, and Affiliate Window

The savvy e-commerce merchant extends his or her website's "path to purchase" well beyond the homepage. It begins on the search engine's results page, or in the results pages of the many shopping "portal" websites that vie to send would-be buyers to your site. But if it's a shopping portal, your participation requires that you deliver a product data feed. In other words, you need to deliver an XML text file packed with details about your products, and feed this into the shopping portal's catalog. Now it's easier than ever:

With the latest System Update, e-commerce merchants using Total Blue System can now create product data feeds for:

• Affiliate Window,
• Yahoo! Shopping, and
• Shop.com (this includes the UK version at http://www.shop-com.co.uk/.

This functionality is accessed from the Catalog section of the Admin Area of Total Blue System. In the left nav bar there are now links for each of these three data feeds. Clicking on one of these links will create a data file correctly formatted for upload to the associated site.

Hint: The feed for Affiliate Window can be easily modified to fit the format required for Kelkoo. Ask for Priority Support should you want tips on how to make this work for Kelkoo.

These capabilities rolled out as "core" features today to all clients began as a simple request from one client for one shopping service. Total Blue System feature development took place in time for 2007's peak holiday shopping season, but the data feeds were only available on a special by-request basis as we evaluated the value of the feature and fine-tuned it. Now it's available for all clients to benefit from. This example is a good description of how Total Blue System evolves as a continuously-updated, hosted software application.

Testing product feeds for shopping portal sites

Extend your product catalog to be viewed by shoppers who haven't yet found your website, but are at the point of selecting a merchant.  How? It's  called a shopping portal, with MySimon, Kelkoo, and Yahoo! shopping being among the more popular.  Here's notice that E-business Coach is working with select clients to test several product feeds this holiday shopping season. Would you like to participate?

Shopping portal participation requires that you deliver a product data feed of your catalog. This means you need to deliver an XML text file describing your products in just the way it's been specified by the portal, and then feed this into the shopping portal's catalog. E-business Coach's programmers can help you create this XML data file.

Here are the likely shopping portals for which we'll create a product data feed:

• Affiliate Window, which is an affiliate marketing program primarily for UK merchants.
• Yahoo! Shopping, and
• Shop.com (starting with hte UK version at http://www.shop-com.co.uk/.

Contact your account manager at E-business Coach if you'd like to help us test these potental "core" features of Total Blue System.

Update in June 2008: The product data feeds for these shopping services are now core features.

Bios give product reviews more credibility

By reducing the barriers to collecting product reviews, the volume has increased. E-commerce merchants are getting more reviews for editing and publishing on the public website catalog. But not surprisingly, most reviews are coming in as anonymous.

To give more credibility to product reviews, you can now solicit reviewers to identify their location. "Share with us where you live," encourages the product review form. While reviewers mostly choose not to identify themselves by name, it would be nice to get a city or country location. The intent is to build up a brief little bio on the reviewer to give credibility to the product review.

Note there are some other slight lay-out enhancements and some additional explanation next to each form field on the page in this latest System Update. The email address field now clarifies the purpose of it's presence on the form, for example.

• Expect more about the email address field on the product review form in a future System Update...

Search engine optimized product URL's: new scheme

Product detail pages, the page with the most information about a single product and the all important "add to cart" button, now have a new URL scheme. This changes comes about as part of the release of a new tabbed product detail page template in the latest System Update.

Whereas before the URL included the name of the category in which the product appears (in human readable words) completed by the product's item # (or Stock Keeping Unit, SKU) and capped with a .html extension, now the product name appears in place of the item #. This somewhat subtle difference offers one more bit of search engine optimization to the URL's in your website catalog.

• An example of the URL: http://yourdomain.com/product_categories/[category ID]-category-name-subcategory-name/products/[product ID]-name-of-product

What may catch your eye is the presence of the category and product ID numbers. Their introduction to the URL provides a number of performance and maintenance benefits, internal to Total Blue System. For example, there ought be some faster page load times on large category pages with many product detail URL's. There is no real harm or gain by their presence in terms of search engine optimization.

• URL's can be shortened for your convenience, removing the SEO-friendly keywords, and function with just ID #'s. The format is: http://yourdomain.com/product_categories/[category ID]/products/[product ID]

One tangible external benefit from the presence of these ID numbers for site owners or visitors is the fact that this URL scheme eliminates the possibility of a "page not found" error being encountered when a product detail page URL is requested and the containing category or subcategories have been renamed (this did happen in certain isolated circumstances before). A second benefit is that this URL scheme with it's ID numbers is consistent with the REST Application Programming Interface architecture style that we've adopted for our API. Third-party developers working to integrate Total Blue System with internal or externally-hosted order management databases will find it easier to work with these URL's.

Important: the old style of product detail page URL's will continue to work indefinitely. We'll phase them out at a point in the future when we're certain to have minimized any possible disruption to search engines or click-throughs from old email marketing messages.

Communicate site-wide messages on product detail page

When your customers are closely examining a product, viewing what's known as the product detail page, there may be one or two key points that prompt the purchase now. You can make these visible at this pivotal point in the browsing process by creating a "Teaser" for the product detail page template. There's now a "teaser spot" on the top  of the product detail template, released as part of this week's System Update.

Keep in mind this teaser spot is not unique to one product, but applied to all products that use the latest, tabbed product detail page template. So the message need be appropriate for all products. Here are some ideas:

• Announce a special, time-sensitive promotion concerning shipping that's worth emphasizing to someone who is about to click the "Add to cart" button.
• Communicate your site's secure ordering process, perhaps by promoting the HackerSafe designation from Scan Alert.

Here's how:
The Teaser Spot is placed at the top of the page, so you could create a graphic image that spans the entire width of the page "body" -- whatever dimension that is for your site. If you're going to post "trust symbols" like the HackerSafe badge, you may want it to float to the far right of the page, with text and other elements on the page wrapping around it. Here's sample code to help you achieve this, which you ought include in the Teaser that you create for this purpose:

Wrap the teaser's contents  in these tags: <div style="float: right">This is my teaser content</div>

Consolidate product option choices to one page

The new product detail page template with tabs for progressive disclosure and minimal scrolling can help you consolidate the product option choices presented to the web shopper. When a product comes in multiple sizes and colors (to use the two most common options for a product), the optimal way to present those choices is on one page. Known as the "product detail page" to Total Blue System users, this page now gracefully handles a product matrix with two, three, or more dimensions.

Here are some highlights:

• Create a product with item ordering options, as many sets as necessary. Examples include color, size, fabric all for one product.
• The Catalog module will perceive which option determines the price variance. The price for each option will then appear in the drop-down select menu that presents that option set. So if the price varies by size, then only the size drop down menu will show the price, separated by white space at the far right of the menu option.
• The price range will be automatically calculated and displayed in place of the product's "Our Price" field value, which is used if there is no price variance among options.
• Each option's select menu will be preceded by a label that you configure. It could be as simple as "Size," for example" or more explanatory as you choose.
• If there are no options for a product, then the drop-down select menus do not appear, of course.

This kind of product arrangement has positive benefits for search engine optimization efforts, as it can eliminate what would otherwise be deemed "duplicate content" from your site as perceived by a search engine spider.

By implementing this kind of product arrangement, you ought also consolidate product reviews into one product detail page. In short, reduce the number of "products" in your website catalog and increase the depth of descriptive content about each product.

The timing of this release matches the release of the new product detail page template in an upcoming System Update that will be coordinated specifically for you and your e-commerce site.

Contact our technical support team for input on how this may interact with your internal order management system. Mail Order Manager users may find there are adjustments necessary to how you store items in MOM, or in how you construct the item # or SKU.

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.