E-Commerce Chatter from Rob Poitras » Rob

Shopbop’s New Mobile Shopping Site

Rob — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 04:09:13 +0000

Just came across M.Shopbop.com and it appears their new shopping site is launched. What is interesting is that they don’t have any web analytics software installed on the page. I wonder how they are tracking visitors and conversions. At least my main Shopbop.com login works on the mobile site so it doesn’t require a separate user account.

Opportunity with Facebook ticker stream

Rob — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 05:05:40 +0000

As part of the new “timeline” functions, Facebook is trying to display updates in a more visually informative way. During the keynote different Facebook key leaders talked about their important “status updates” in life and how it is shown within Facebook activity stream. Reid Hastings went on to talk about how “Netflix watching status” updates the ticker status based on what someone is watching with their Netflix account.
This got me to thinking how discovering, talking about, lusting and buying fashion is a big part of what lots of fashion interested people talk about online. I see the big opportunity for all e-commerce fashion retailers to incorporate different stages of fashion related actions into the primary stream and the new ticker stream.

For example, a user could “want the item” then within a set time period if they purchase the shoes they wanted, the retailer could offer a gift card IF they use the Facebook “purchased” button for the item.

The other options is to display the Facebook buttons in the past orders history section. Under each product could be a Facebook button that would use the FB API and make a type of action that said “I wore this ‘Marc by Marc Jacobs necklace’ in this photo”. Then they could tag the photo they are wearing that Marc Jacobs item so it would display the update below the photo.

Rob — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 03:09:50 +0000

Going to try and post again. I have been working on some really cool projects and didn’t want anyone stealing the ideas and doing it themselves.

Rob — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 02:58:50 +0000

I’m talking about going beyond just a blog to super-serving customers with compiling content across multiple channels each month.

Main Ingredients of Subscription Commerce: from @Percival
Totally agree and I think this is the interesting part of any e-commerce company trying to sell fashion that isn’t a commodity. The branding has expanded past the celebrity product placements in OK! magazine and into deep content creation focused around the brand. Like how Burberry is putting a lot of effort into their fashion shows and producing media onto their digital channels.

5 Changes Needed For All New Volusion Stores

Rob — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:04:04 +0000

1.Change to SEO friendly URLs. Then first focus on setting the SEO information for your categories since those are more important over your products for getting indexed on Google.
2.Verify your site with Google webmaster tools & add the Google analytics tracking code to your template. If you change templates make sure you move the code over to the new template. Also make sure you use the analytics modified code that is provided by Volusion.
3.Configure the robots.txt file to include your sitemap. This will help Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines find your sitemap easier so they can index your site easier.
It should read something very basic like:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.com/google_sitemap.asp
4.Once you have added your products, set the Google product type and submit your products to google base. This needs to be done once a month.
5.Write unique category descriptions. The site has to have unique content. When you add new products you also need to write unique product descriptions as well. Yes it is a pain to write descriptions for each of your products. If you want to sell more than your competition then you have to out work them.

Bonus points. Add the canonical tag to your template for the home page. In your footer make sure you have links to the product (“pindex.asp”) & category (“cindex.asp”) index pages.

Patience & the long tail

Rob — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:07:28 +0000

These are the stats from my flickr account for the last 30 days. I have been adding photos since the first of the year. Usually get around 500 hits a day and it has slowly been rising. Just recently 3 different unrelated photos are now indexed on some search engines and are getting a lot of traffic.

The main lesson here is that it just takes time for content to take off. Somtimes people get lucky and their content site takes off within a month or two, for others it could be a year the site to hit full stride. It appears my flickr is now in full stride and doing well