Data feeds are an integral part of marketing an ecommerce site. A data feed is nothing more than a list of your products, along with certain product details, in a structured format. The details included in the file depend on your site needs and the requirements of the partner to whom you’re submitting your data.
Comparison Shopping Engines, or CSEs, have grown in popularity and number over the past decade. They represent a large marketing opportunity for online merchants. These sites take submitted product data feeds from many merchants, match up the products offered by each store, and allow customers to compare prices across the various stores.
Not a lot of small ecommerce sites use video yet. It’s a shame, because video has promoted sales for larger retailers, and bloggers big and small already know the draw of video-based content. Videos can engage customers, drive additional traffic from other channels, and even boost your SEO rankings.
Great product images are a major key to success for any e-commerce store. A website has to do its best to replace a customer’s ability to see and touch the physical items like they would at the store.
I’m sure you know the old saying: “If you make something idiot-proof, the world will just build a better idiot”. Unfortunately it’s downright, 100% true, and I’d bet $5 that your store isn’t as idiot-proof as you think it is. The problem is that we’re so close to our own stores, or those we develop […]
I started this three-part series about ecommerce-related accounts on Twitter two weeks ago. It began with E-commerce Gurus to Follow on Twitter, and then last week I followed up with Shopping Carts to Follow on Twitter.
Last week I posted a list of some of my favorite e-commerce gurus on Twitter. Today I want to follow up with a list of popular shopping carts who are also active on Twitter.
It’s no secret that I love Twitter – news sharing, conversations, and my daily 15 minutes of “fame”, as it were. The best part is the sheer number of truly brilliant and informed people tweeting about ecommerce. Looking for some additional information about online retailing? Start here.
Google recently made two important updates to its search algorithm, know as the “Farmer” and “Panda” updates in the SEO world. The main goal was to weed out low-quality sites, particularly those known as “content farms” – sites that churn out hundreds or thousands of pages with short, unresearched articles.
Last time I wrote about optimizing your e-commerce site for performance, and I focused on the front-end: the HTML, images, and other elements delivered to the browser. Today I want to talk about back-end optimization, or optimizing how data is processed on your server before it’s sent to your customer’s browser.