Fourth Wave Consulting

Get Full SEO Value for Your Review Content

Power Reviews (now BazaarVoice) allows websites to add product reviews for each item. One of the best side benefits of adding reviews to your site is the user generated content, which is rich with long tail keywords that users are searching with to find your products. The typical methodfor enabling search engine friendly reviews with Power Reviews is called their ‘in-line SEO’ solution. Unfortunately NetSuite companies haven’t been able to implement the solution due to limitations within the NetSuite platform. Fourth Wave Consulting has developed a fully automated solution that works around these limitations, and provides the full SEO benefits.

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The Problem

Up until now, NetSuite websites have been forced to use the JavaScript implementation for Power Reviews. Continue reading “Announcing the First Automated Power Reviews Inline SEO Implementation for NetSuite” »

David Norris

Over the years, I have delved into many fascinating areas of technology, and have spent much of my time optimizing NetSuite accounts and websites. Whether building websites or servicing my IT clients, my focus is always on providing as much value to my customers as possible, and helping them to solve their most difficult problems.

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An Easy Way to Estimate the Value of Multiple Projects

One of the best features of the NetSuite ERP system is its all-encompassing nature. It’s possible to run every department of your company in NetSuite, which means that your NetSuite administrator has many choices when it comes to optimizing the system. How do you decide between improving customer service case handling versus a smoother estimate/quoting system for sales versus a faster shipping process in the warehouse? There are many NetSuite customizations or automation projects that hold the promise of a significant benefit for your company. By using some straightforward formulas, it’s possible to estimate the return for a number of different projects, which can make prioritization much easier.

The Many Types of Return

One of the challenges of comparing multiple projects is that some projects provide benefits that are harder to put into dollar terms. We recommend estimating the dollar value of the less tangible benefits, which will allow you to compare numbers more easily. It might seem arbitrary, but it can be a useful exercise. Here are some examples of soft ROI or less tangible returns we have seen from Netsuite related projects:

• Better or faster customer service
• Improved marketing flexibility or segmentation
• Fewer returns

Continue reading “How to Calculate the ROI for NetSuite Projects” »

David Norris

Over the years, I have delved into many fascinating areas of technology, and have spent much of my time optimizing NetSuite accounts and websites. Whether building websites or servicing my IT clients, my focus is always on providing as much value to my customers as possible, and helping them to solve their most difficult problems.

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10 Questions to Ask a Potential NetSuite Consulting Partner

NetSuite is the world’s most successful software as a service (SaaS) ERP system, and has been built to be as flexible as possible for as many types of businesses as they can. As a result, NetSuite is a powerful platform that can automate many business processes and run companies efficiently. Out-of-the-box, however, NetSuite is not particularly well set up for any specific company, and a great deal of customization is required to get the most out of NetSuite.

NetSuite companies have a lot of the same kinds of problems

Fourth Wave consulting has worked with quite a few small and medium businesses over the years, and we have found that once a company has been on NetSuite for a few years, they face the same kinds of issues. For example:

1. Problems crop up for older scripts, and the consultant who wrote it is no longer around.
2. Over the years, their NetSuite account gets more and more customized with an increasing number of workflows and SuiteScript, none of which are particularly well documented or written by the same people, making issues harder to troubleshoot.
3. Vendors and consultants can engage in finger-pointing, blaming others for a technical problem, and no one in the company has a firm enough grasp on the technical details to determine the source of a problem.
4. When a NetSuite upgrade rolls out, a customization or script that worked previously now has an issue, and the person who wrote it isn’t available to help.

By hiring consultants for piecemeal work, often looking for the lowest bidder, many companies harm themselves by not fully appreciating how important the consultant relationship is for NetSuite. It is a complicated platform that needs ongoing maintenance and support to stay fully functional. Not to mention the large savings that can be had by ongoing customizations, workflows, and other task automation.

The Solution: A NetSuite Partner You Can Trust

Even for companies who can afford to hire full-time staff to support their NetSuite account, is very hard to have all of the relevant NetSuite experience in-house. Optimizing NetSuite covers a lot of ground, and requires a vast array of skills; it is very hard for any one person to master all areas of NetSuite. Bringing in the right NetSuite consultant for the right projects can make a huge difference, and will more than pay for itself. Here is my top 10 list of things to evaluate in a NetSuite consultant:

1. Ask them about their areas of expertise. Even with a large consulting firm, you will be dealing with a relatively small number of people. Ask the team to grade their expertise (1 to 10 scale) in the following areas:
   1. Web Site related – not all of these may be relevant, and other people may be brought in to cover gaps if necessary:
      1. Website usability
      2. Information architecture (the science of organizing content for a website)
      3. Copywriting

      Continue reading “What to Look for in a NetSuite Consultant – Top 10 Checklist” »

David Norris

Over the years, I have delved into many fascinating areas of technology, and have spent much of my time optimizing NetSuite accounts and websites. Whether building websites or servicing my IT clients, my focus is always on providing as much value to my customers as possible, and helping them to solve their most difficult problems.

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Three Staging Methods Explained

One thing that many NetSuite customers struggle with is the ability to set up a proper staging environment so they can test things before they launch them on their website. Tthere are three ways that I know of to test out new changes on a NetSuite template driven e-commerce site, and I will go through the pros and cons of each.

My 3rd Favorite Option: Using a Staging Site Theme + Preview

Your website theme controls many of the persistent elements of your web site’s template, including the main body template, sidebars, add to cart button, and other graphical elements. If previewing a theme worked as expected, it would be a good way of testing out changes to any of the settings under the theme, but there are too many major drawbacks for most sites to make this a viable option. It’s very easy to test if your site will work okay with this preview method, simply click the preview link for your live site theme, and if it looks the same, than I would give it a try.

Pros

• If you only have one website, and don’t have anything in your categories’ meta tag or greeting fields, the preview version may be a close enough match to the live version to allow you to test changes that are in the theme.
• There is no chance of messing up your current live site using this method.

Continue reading “Ways to Set Up a NetSuite Staging Web Site” »

David Norris

Over the years, I have delved into many fascinating areas of technology, and have spent much of my time optimizing NetSuite accounts and websites. Whether building websites or servicing my IT clients, my focus is always on providing as much value to my customers as possible, and helping them to solve their most difficult problems.

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One thing I have found to be true with almost every company I have worked with that has been on NetSuite for a while is that saved searches tend to proliferate, and can become a big inefficient mess that is hard to deal with. Here are the best strategies I have found for managing a big list of saved searches:

1. Use a company–wide naming convention for all saved searches to make them easier to sort. Naming convention guidelines:
   1. Avoid using a colon (:) in the saved search name as that can cause problems with the global search
   2. Use NetSuite’s pagination to your advantage – you can reorder A search by clicking on a column,, so maybe have one person create all the saved searches for their department so you can sort by owner.
   3. By default, saved searches will be sorted by name – use a person’s initials or department code at the beginning of the name for each saved search for that department.
   4. As of this writing, there is no way to set up a search portlet for saved searches, but the global search does work on saved search names. If you are consistent in the way you name searches, you can reuse some of the words later on in a global search to find just the relevant searches. For example, use ‘KPI’ in all saved searches that source a KPI, and you can then do a global search for KPI to find them all.
2. Pruning – saved searches tend to multiply a number like hangers in a closet, so set yourself a regular tasks to go through your saved searches once a month and remove any that might have been created during testing, or are no longer used. Administrators can check a box to show all private searches, and they can clean up on others’ behalf. You can sort saved searches by who or when they were last run, inactivating the older ones. If this causes a problem, it’s easy to reactivate the search.

Continue reading “Top 8 tips for Managing Lots of NetSuite Saved Searches” »

David Norris

Over the years, I have delved into many fascinating areas of technology, and have spent much of my time optimizing NetSuite accounts and websites. Whether building websites or servicing my IT clients, my focus is always on providing as much value to my customers as possible, and helping them to solve their most difficult problems.

More Posts - Website

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