E-Commerce and LAN Solutions

One of the best features of having a database-driven e-commerce site is that there is one centralized place to store all your product information. You can then manipulate the data in all sorts of ways, and all of these applications can be updated in more or less automated fashions, integrating all the changes you’ve made to your one central source. Some examples:

• Build a print catalog
• Create an offline browsable catalog
• Create data feeds for shopping sites like Froogle, Amazon.com, shopping.com, shopzilla.com, and many more. These sites (except Froogle) charge you to either directly sell your product on their site or send you highly qualified traffic.

It’s always a good idea to grab the low hanging fruit (i.e. taking opportunities that are relatively easy to implement and have a large potential upside). Froogle, Google’s shopping search engine, is my pick for shopping sites. Not only is it completely free, but it gets a good deal of traffic and isn’t likely to dry up anytime soon. Since it costs nothing but some time (and this guide) to implement, I would recommend it to any e-commerce vendor on Netsuite. Froogle really likes a fresh data feed – you will want to set up a recurring reminder for yourself so you can submit a new feed every two weeks or so (it’s really easy after it’s all set up).

Set Up Your Google Account

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One of the great features of Netsuite is that they provide custom tags to include in the HTML code of the customizations to their site templates. It’s pretty flexible for the most part, but they often generate ugly HTML and an inflexible visual appearance. One good example of this is the <%=getGlobalSearchHtml()%> tag.

Problems with getGlobalSearchHtml

• It forces the search results to be returned as a subset of the Tab the user is currently on. This usually isn’t a problem, except it’s silly to expect the user to understand how the designer set up the tabs or that they are trying to search within one particular tab. The results returned are global, so why keep them in a tab? My guess is they didn’t think about it much. A related bug is that any tag replacements you have set up will be lost if a user clicks a search result that lives in another tab.


• Netsuite doesn’t support placing the tag in the Logo & Tabs area of the page. That’s right, for some reason Netsuite thinks the only area a site designer would place a search box is at the top of the left column below the header, even though a quick search for web usability guidelines disagrees. Regardless, there is no reason for Netsuite to arbitrarily dictate placement of any site element, and certainly no technical reason for it. Why they would bother making a custom tag they only allow to be used in exactly the same place the search box would be generated without the custom tag is beyond me. I tried the tag out in the Logo & Tabs anyway and of course it worked.
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One of the weaknesses of ASP hosted E-Commerce system Netsuite is that there’s no way to access statistics on users who are searching on your site (note this is different than a user searching in a search engine and landing on your site). They will eventually implement it, which is good for the following reasons:

• Hard to find product. Search logs give you insight into what is for many the last chance to find something on your site. Chances are the most frequently searched for terms are hard to find on your site (or you don’t carry them). This is a great way to find additional content/products/etc to add to your site. You want your least popular/profitable products to be the most commonly searched for terms, definitely not anything you are pushing.


• Check the results. A user searching on your site is not always an indication of a navigation failure – some users simply prefer it and try it first. Check the most searched terms to make sure the results are helpful and bring up the correct categories, product or information items (Netsuite doesn’t currently index knowledge bases, even if they are published). If you aren’t getting the search results you want, I have some tips at the end of this post on how to tweak them.


• Search percentage. Look at the percentage of people searching – total number of searches for a time period divided by the number of unique visitors. You have to know something about your visitors to draw conclusions from this, but I would say unless your site is just huge and broad, you want this to be a low number. A retailer client of mine has a ratio of .036.


• Identify navigation problems. Your search logs shouldn’t have any terms that are very popular – optimally you want a lot of terms searched for seldomly. If you have any terms (or a few)that are significantly more than the top 10 or 15, it’s a good indication that you aren’t giving the user the proper cues to find the content, or are landing them (through natural listings or PPC) on the wrong page.

Great, so how do I get this data now?

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For those who don’t know, Netsuite is a hosted, ASP model ERP solution – you can manage your entire site and back-end inventory and accounting with one package, all through your browser. I spend a lot of time with their system, and will be posting on occasion tutorials, reivews, complaints and praise.

Google Analytics is actually Urchin web stats, which Google bought and retooled. They started offering it free in late 2005, and it’s comparable in power and usability to some very expensive packages. I highly recommend it.

1. First, you must have a Google Analytics account with an available profile – you can find out more here.
2. Create a custom tag named GOOGLYTICS (or whatever name you prefer). Add <GOOGLYTICS> to the Footer section under site templates. It really only needs to be someplace on each page, inside the <body> and </body> tags. Your code will look something like this:

   
   <script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript"> 
   </script> 
   <script type="text/javascript"> 
       _uacct = "UA-######-1"; (the # will be replaced with your account number)
       _udn="none"; 
       _ulink=1; 
       _ucsr="gcid"; 
       _uctr="keyword"; 
       urchinTracker(); 
   </script> 

3. For the Checkout and My Account tabs, replace the GOOGLYTICS tag with the following (more…)

Introduction

This article is written for a web-savvy user who is interested in optimizing their Netsuite hosted E-Commerce site for better placement in search engines’ natural search engine results pages (SERPs). It assumes a good deal of knowledge about Internet basics, but anyone actively involved on the technical side of a Netsuite store should be familiar with the terms and concepts I use. If you have any questions, please feel free to let me know.

A Brief Introduction to Search Engine Optimization

I don’t want to reinvent the wheel too much here. There are many great guides to understanding SEO, here are a few of my favorites:

• 26 Steps to 15,000 visitors/day


• SEOmoz.org’s beginner’s guide


• SEObook.com (the only book I’ve bought on SEO)

The short version is that any web site plan needs to include more than just making search engines happy. A successful site will need to work on all 6 of the E-commerce pillars, as I cover in the linked article.

For now I want to focus on Netsuite and the tools it offers (and workarounds for those it doesn’t) to improve your SERP placement. Keep in mind that the success of everything I’m talking about below depends on how thoroughly you’ve researched the important keywords for your topic and structured your site to direct traffic to the appropriate areas. Much more about this later.

Things Netsuite Does Well

Unique Title and Meta Tags
The title tag is the single biggest bang for the buck SEO technique, and Netsuite allows you to create an unique one for each page. (more…)