ShopVisible Blog

ShopVisible attended a re-platforming seminar conducted by Eli Katz, President of Ashford.com at the 2010 Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition and shared a few thoughts on how the ShopVisible e-commerce platform stands up to some of the biggest challenges retailers face in re-platforming their business.

The discussion centered on some of the critical issues retailers should consider when going through a re-platforming for their ecommerce business. Mr. Katz has launched a beautiful new and robust site for Ashford.com, but pointed out some cautionary tales of common issues the businesses face. When your site requires five (or more) different systems that require additional resources, time and money to do what one system should do seamlessly, re-platforming may be the right solution. But be careful that the new system does not end up requiring five new ones, and many new resources in the process.

Also, speed is crucial to the success any re-platforming process because time is money. Have you noticed how all the additional customizations push back your site launch weeks sometimes months longer than anticipated?

When Ashford.com made their switch from their original open source platform provider, they expected the aforementioned inefficiencies would be resolved with their re-launched platform powered by their new enterprise solution. However, with even the best of plans and intentions, there can be forks in the road and an aggressive 6 month launch plan can take 4 times that time. Mr, Katz mentioned a few specific common stumbling blocks that etailers should watch out for…


(1) Often, the catalog and data structure more complex than anticipated

(2) More third party tools needed to be implemented than originally planned that may introduce more time, complexity and risks than anticipated

(3) Projects can frequently run over budget and behind schedule

(4) Migrations can leave small, but important details overlooked potentially breaking tracking, disrupting existing business processes, and losing marketing traction in search

ShopVisible’s re-platforming process is efficient, in most cases requiring one-third of the time to market compared to our competitors. Because we build and implement our own sites for our clients, there is great attention to detail of how the site, the business, and the underlying technology synchronizes. To ensure seamless and non-disruptive migration ShopVisible’s platform utilizes automatic 301 redirects to preserve search rankings and existing traffic sources and our suite of platform migration tools to ensure smooth launches. While we understand that re-platforming can be scary business, don’t get trapped into a lengthy process that is more complex than what you started with. Just ask AbsoluteBarStools.com, whose site we launched in 45 days!

ShopVisible’s integration with the major online marketplace Craigslist gives its online retailer clients a major advantage in selling products.  Clients can use the ShopVisible platform to place ads on the Craiglists website straight from the Site Manager, the same user-interface they use to manage all aspects of their business, including multi-channel sales.  This feature is just another way that ShopVisible clients benefit from the maximum exposure of products online without additional frustration and hassle.

An online retailer can create an advertisement with the ShopVisible platform to promote any number or combination of products and services.  Likewise, the schedule, content, and location of the advertisement can be manipulated and created with ease within the ShopVisible Site Manager.  Furthermore, the advertisement can be viewed both in standard and HTML format before published from the platform.  Later a retailer can use the platform to view this ad and previously placed ones again.  Essentially, an online retailer does not have to visit the Craigslist website to place or view an advertisement. 

The ShopVisible platform fully integrates with other important online channels, such as Amazon, eBay, and Overstock.  Also, the platform has compatible software with comparison websites that are frequently used by online shoppers.

Yet again, the ShopVisible platform  does the heavy lifting on technology while the online retailer enjoys the results of both increased sales and visibility by integrating with the biggest marketplaces on the web such as Craigslist. 

Keywords, descriptions, and robots. All three are bits of Meta information that should be at the top of each page of your site to help search engines classify your site. Meta information helps search engines figure out what's on your webpage when they spider you. Proper Meta information can help boost search results and increase the number of people who click on a link to your site, bad Meta data can tank your search results and make it hard for customers to find you. Now I don’t intend to talk about the gritty HTML coding side of Meta data, though really Meta information is probably one of the easiest things to code. Instead I plan to talk about what's important when it comes to Meta data and what you should be sure to avoid.

Let’s start with keywords, now keywords used to be a great way for search engines to quickly figure out what kind of content a page might have and in the 90’s search engines like AltaVista used them to great effect.  However unscrupulous website owners often stuffed misdirecting or false keywords that would often drive search engine results to spam sites. So by the turn of the century search engines started to discount keywords as something they ranked sites on in search terms. Keywords may or may not still influence search results but don’t lose any sleep trying to figure out the perfect two word description for the page, content is far more important. While writing keywords keep a few things in mind first keywords can be words or short phrases, ‘e-commerce’ and ‘complete e-commerce solution’ are both valid types of keywords.  Second is to separate your list of keywords by commas i.e. ‘e-commerce, e-commerce provider, integrated e-commerce’. Also be sure never to pack or ‘stuff’ too many keywords because while search engines may not weigh keywords heavily it is considered black hat, or bad practice, to put more than ten to fifteen keyword phrases into the tag.

Now let’s talk about description tags. Description tags serve a dual purpose, the first is to help search engine spiders figure out what your page is all about. The second and more important purpose is that the content in a description tag will often be used by a search engine on the search results page. Those little blurbs you see under links in search results, those are often times Meta descriptions. Sometimes a search engine might pull those little blurbs from the content of your site but it is always good to have a useful description in your Meta data. The key to good Meta data is to keep it short and sweet, try to keep it to about 200 characters as that is generally about the space you will have for a blurb on a search engine. Also start your Meta description with the most important thing about the description. If you are selling widgets try a phrase like “widgets designed to save you money” instead of a phrase like “save money when you buy our widgets”, search engines like Google prioritize the information in descriptions based on the order they appear the first word is considered the most important with each successive word being a little less important to your site.

And now it time to talk about the final and oft overlooked bit of Meta data you should be concerned about. The robots tag, the robots tag tells a search engine whether or not it is allowed to index a certain page, follow the links on the page or archive the page on its servers. As a general rule you should allow search engines to index your page and follow the links on your page unless there is content on there that you deem to be sensitive, after all to build a good search engine result you are going to want points for links and page content. Now archiving pages is a different matter, archived pages are those pages that appear in under a Google search result and are often called ‘cached’ it could be useful for you to allow a search engine to cache your page or it could be a determent to you. It all depends on how often you update your site and the kind of content you have on your site. A cached or archived page will not be the most current version of you site and if a visitor clicks on a cached link they might get outdated content. However if your site ever experiences any down time a visitor can simply visit the cached version of your site to gather the information they need, that is of course if Google has decided to cache the page they cannot after all make duplicates of everything on the internet. To get a search engine to index your page, follow all the links on your page and not cache your page you would write in the content field “index, follow, noarchive”. To learn how to code your own meta tags visit this useful site.

Well that’s about it for meta information. I know it got a little heavy near the end there but I hope it was all helpful and you find this information useful in maximizing your search rankings. But don’t forget Meta data is important but never place more value on it than the content of your site.

Bharat C.