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. 

Manage category tree for optimal SEO and 'Path to Purchase'

With seasonal changes in your web catalog, or with organizational changes driven by search engine optimization (SEO), the work to keep your catalog's categories or departments in order can be a chore. What's called the 'category tree' in Total Blue System's Catalog module now makes this work easier for you.

When your web catalog goes through some turmoil, consider this:

1. For any category that has subcategories, does it have its own products associated with it?
   
   If yes, those products won't display on the public pages of the site. The category gateway template will only display subcategories; thus those products are effectively invisible. To clarify, they'll be invisible until there's a category gateway template offered that merges the role of the category gallery template (showing products) with that of the category gateway template (showing subcategories...).
2. Are there any categories with 0 products? Now you can more quickly spot these likely unfinished or old categories.
3. Are there any categories with more than 30 products? If yes, it may suggest a need for better allocation across multiple subcategories. Or else you ought delete old products to simplify management of the category.
   
   Now you can see how many products are contained in each subcategory. (Note: The product count is specific to that category only, and not inclusive of subcategories beneath it.)
   
   
4. Are products hidden that ought not be? The view of the category tree now makes this obvious.

Lastly, you can now spot hidden categories a little easier as they're highlighted. Hidden categories can serve a search engine optimization (SEO) purpose in ways that don't clutter your primary category or department tree, typically visible from a left side navigation bar. There are also merchandising considerations that suggest hidden categories. For example, a category like "online exclusives" OUGHT be hidden and linked to prominently from teaser spots rather than being lumped next to topic or functional or gender categories in a main navigation bar. By making the category hidden, it won't be visible in the left nav bar. Ask us about how to evaluate which categories ought be hidden and which visible...

The category tree deserves special attention, as it serves not only as the "path to purchase" for the human shopper, but a key factor in your site's overall search engine optimization.

"Landing page" template eliminated after solving the root problem

For shoppers who arrive at your site referred by a search engine's results page (SERP), you've got just a moment to grab and hold their attention. Total Blue System's Catalog module used to have a special page template intended for this purpose, specific to a product detail page.

Known as the "landing page template," it consisted of a stripped down, minimalist look without all navigation options and without all of the product details and related content. Site owners could link to a product, add a special snippet of code to the end of the URL, and transform the page into using the "landing page template." This was frequently done in the context of search marketing, especially as cost-per-click, click-through landing pages. No more; the feature has been eliminated. Here's why:

First, the new tab orientation of the enhanced product detail page template goes a long way towards solving the problem that the landing page template intended to solve: progressive disclosure. The reason there existed a need for the landing page template in the first place was because, at the time, the product detail page template did too much, showed too much, scrolled too much, all at once. Not anymore. So the landing page template's reason for being has disappeared.

Second, we believe in removing software features. Call it pruning or refactoring or whatever you wish, but we look for reasons to eliminate features or preferences or configurations that, in the end, don't matter. If for some reason we find the landing page template or it's intention to needed again, that's fine. We'll add it back. But over the long-term, the objective of our turn-key e-commerce product is to provide all of the features you need and none that you don't. That means removing features or older code when prudent.

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.

Monitor results from Froogle, Google Base

You can send your website product catalog data to the Froogle shopping engine, via the Google Base integration with your website's Catalog module. What's new is that now you can track the results more precisely.

Since our clients have standardized on the Google Analytics tool, we're now embedding a Google Analytics tracking URL within the product URL's that are sent to Google Base from your catalog.

So if your product URL is something like http://www.[domain].com/catalog/category/p_123.html, the URL that is now sent to Google Base looks like this:  http://www.[domain].com/catalog/category/p_123.html? utm_source=googlebase

This uses the utm_source variable and gives it a source that's unique from the 'google' source you'd otherwise see. But because it's a source, you'll see it alongside the other search engine sources in your reports: yahoo, google, ask, msn, etc. (Note: the utm_medium variable is not being specified, so we'll have to see how Google Analytics perceives it, possibly the 'organic' search medium because there is no cost for the Google Base listings.)

We want to measure how effective Google Base will be at sending you qualified buyers. It's important to the future of the Catalog module in 2007, as we anticipate building out the capability for more structured data about your products. One reason to do this is because Google Base can accept more structured data and then refer your products more effectively (in theory). For example, data about what age group your products are appropriate for, as in the case of children's educational products or toys.

But first, let's see what impact Google Base makes in referring shoppers to your site...

Mix content & commerce, merchandising & SEO

Website shoppers who use search engines to find products to buy have a tendency to quickly bounce in and out of sites, as they click through search result links to a merchant's product category page and then back to the engine's search results page. Wouldn't it be nice to grab that shopper for a moment, and capture her interest in something BESIDES the price? "Take your time, listen to our story, hear what other satisfied customers have to say..." This is one of the goals of a new category gallery page template released today as part of a Total Blue System update.

The "Gallery Core Sortable - 2 Column" template is now available within your Catalog module in the Admin Area. See the screen shot at right for an example of what it looks like. The basic components are a sortable listing of products in two columns, plus a right side bar that features content from your website Articles module, Teasers, and Catalog module. Here's a breakdown of what's possible, as the right side bar has several conditional elements:

1. Display a Teaser, with an optimal width of 214 pixels. You can set this as a new "Teaser Spot" within the Teasers section of the Admin Area. The same Teaser will display regardless of which category this template is applied to. Use it for site-wide promotions that aren't unique to one category, like a special holiday shipping offer, for example.
2. Display a customer's product review. Sometimes shoppers aren't clear which product within a category is most attractive, until they read someone else raving about a particular item. This area pulls the 5 most recently approved customer product reviews, then makes a random selection of 1 review from that set. Note: there has to be at least 1 product review for a product within that category for it to display.
3. Display a featured product. From all of the products that are marked "featured within category" within the product's display options, within this category, this template displays one such product, pulling a random selection from that set of products.
4. Display an Article. From all of the Articles that are marked "related to this product category" within the Article's display options, this template displays one such article, pulling a random selection from that set of articles. If a photo exists for the article, it will display in a thumbnail size.
5. Display Top Sellers. The top 3 selling products within this category, calculated from a rolling total of the last two week's sales history (coming from your order fulfillment system or website, depending on the integration in place for you). Simple text links are used to highlight those products that sell best, identifying name and price only.

Improving the "freshness" factor of your category gallery pages is one of the underlying goals of this template. Yes, it's oriented around what human shoppers will see with their eyes when visiting this page, but it's also oriented around what a search engine bot or spider will see. In the latter case especially, it's important that each visit to this page communicate "new stuff" to the search engine. For this reason, we're pulling in a random display of content like customer reviews and articles that will always be different. The objective is to give the search engine spider the perception that this category gallery page changes frequently -- more frequently than you might normally add new products to this category. It's an example of blending search engine optimization with your site merchandising efforts, striving for a balance between the two.