As EVP at MerchantAdvantage, one of my responsibilities is to analyze multiple shopping cart technologies before integrating storefront data into our Channel Management system.
This is an essential process as it ensures that an online merchant’s data is compliant with our data transport system from which we easily distribute data into various marketing channels, such as shopping comparison sites, comparison shopping engines, marketplaces, such as Amazon, Shop.com and Underbid, and other unique marketing channels such as m-commerce sites, such as iSave.com, mPoria.com, mShopper.com, and review and coupon sites, such as PowerReviews.com and MyCoupons.com.
As I do this, I have established 3 points of analysis to make the process as reliable as possible. As technology changes, and new marketing outlets emerge, I think it is important for each merchant to look at their shopping cart infrastructure and analyze the ease of portability of their data into other systems in order to keep ongoing marketing integration “surprise-less”.
Merchants should perform this type of analysis in between the busy season; let’s say before or after March – ergo after the holiday season and before the summer rush. My suggestion is that a technical person should compile a list of questions to ask their shopping cart vendor, in order to ensure that the online merchant fully understands the “power” and “limitations” of their shopping cart technology and how it allows the online merchant to utilize many other software technologies to help the online merchant grow their business.
To begin, here are some definitions to consider – just so we understand each other.
Portability: A shopping cart’s capacity to integrate into a totally disparate system without losing product data impact.
Data Impact: The scale of impact that product data has functioning independently within an online merchant’s or marketed outside of an online merchant’s website. Product data contained within a an individual shopping cart, and website, may have “high impact” on marketing — as product descriptions, manufacturing names, pictures, pricing, and general marketing is robust and current.
However, if incorrectly formatted and mapped to an outside “software system”, the robust product data will have a “low impact” if it is taken out of its current shopping cart technology infrastructure and put on/within a marketing. In order to maintain product data’s “high impact” it is essential to ensure that the original data is mapped to correspond to the required elements of a marketing channel. This might include updating and creating: varied coding requirements, dropping/eliminating symbols, dropping/eliminating line breaks, adding varied prices and inventories levels, changing pictures and product names, and updating marketing descriptions.
An example of something that can cause “low impact” data on marketing channels is a shopping cart’s capacity to output a “new” product file on a scheduled basis, without encoding or symbols. This type of “new and daily export” yields usable data and not blank columns, or duplicate columns, in a data feed to marketing feed, that then will be rejected.
Marketing Outlet or Channel: A separate system used to market product data and drive sales into an online merchant’s site or on another site on behalf of the online merchant.
Marketplace: A marketing channel where the purchase is made outside of the cart and orders are fulfilled by the merchant. The order may be processed by the marketplace or the merchant, but the merchant is somewhat invisible during the view and ordering process. Examples would be Amazon.com, Shop.com, and Underbid.com.
CSE: Comparison Shopping Engine, a.k.a. Comparison Shopping site. This is a marketing channel where the goal is to drive a consumer back to your shopping cart to complete the purchase there. CSEs may charge the merchant a pay-per-click pay-per-lead or commission from all sales referred by the CSE to the online merchant, such as couparison shopping sites do.
Parent /Child Relationship, Options: Many products have options associate with the product before a final purchase is made, i.e., size, color, etc. This is especially true with clothing. These options show up on web pages and the website directs the consumer to select certain options related to a product before the consumer proceeds to checkout. This is great when the purchase happens on the merchant’s website, but how does an online merchant handle all of these options when exporting data to marketing channels and having to deal with a myriad of taxonomy and mapping issues as they relate to each marketing channel?
To answer this, the online merchant must assess:
1. the origination point of the data within their shopping cart technology
2. the options available to access the date therein
3. portability issues (i.e. ease of output and export)
…ultimately forcing the online merchant to analyze how the data is stored in its rawest form in the original database.
Just because a shopping cart technology can export data does not mean that that data is exported in the “form” that you need it exported. For instance, some shopping cart technologies export feature creates new line items for each option; some may create a field with every possible color/size possibility, while others do not.
Essentially shopping cart technologies, while trying to “play well with other,” simply do not and export features inherent in many shopping cart technologies are not designed to sync easily with the many requirements that are essential to working with marketing channels.
This lack of syncing of data is why we created MerchantAdvantage – to make the communication between systems seamless – and is the NUMBER ONE BREAKING POINT for online merchants to work with, and integrate with, systems and marketing channels out side of the their shopping cart technology.
So what should an online merchant be asking themselves to work effectively and efficiently with marketing channels and other systems out side of their shopping cart technology?
Remembering the definitions I outlined above, here are the questions I ask of online merchants about their shopping cart technology before transporting their data to ensure that we have the same “highest impact” data on/within marketing channels. I would be glad to do it with any online merchant, just give us a call at MerchantAdvantage, or you can do it on your own.
5 Questions to ask about your company data & company to see if your shopping cart is portable:
1. Where will this data be used to market? Marketplaces, CSEs, other marketing channels?
2. Is there a unique identifier for each product that stays the same all of the time?
a. Is that unique number for joined products (options) referenced in all joined products (i.e., do child products reference parent – see definition above)?
3. Are there Product URLs and Image URLs? And do they work?
4. Are there encoded characters, ASCII Characters, Line-breaks, or data anomalies?
5. Can any product data export process be automated?
a. Is the location to where exports are updated and pushed to always available on the internet
b. Is the location updated on a scheduled basis that parallels your shopping cart technology cart updates and changes?
5 Questions to ask to see if your portability is optimized:
1. Is each piece of necessary data stored in separate fields or columns, i.e., manufacturer, manufacturer part number, or availability, and not all clumped together in one general description.
Special Note: Some marketing channels require this data in different orders and formatting unique to their marketing channel.
2. Are the marketing descriptions sensible and concise, containing all important data at the front of the description (within first 100 characters)?
Special Note: descriptions can be indexed/searchable and are usually trimmed to the first set of 100 characters.
3. Is the “Cost Field” present in the export?
Special Note: Adjustments to the “Pricing” and “Marketing” fields may be made at any time of the product data dispersion process.
4. Do the unique identifiers match competitors’ unique identifiers?
Special Note: Consumers will and can see your items when viewing competitors’ products on CSEs.
5. Does my data meet all of the requirements of each requested marking channel that I am trying to get/feed to?
Special Note: Each marketing channel requires different types and formats of data delivery.
Okay, now what?
My suggestions:
1. after each question has been answered and each possible point-of-failure has been addressed then you can move onto the planning and process of into which marketing channels you want to work with and feed your product catalog data.
2. You have taken the most important step of data feed integration and marketing, namely understanding what your shopping cart technology allows you to do and not to do and, most important, understanding what you need to do to make sure that you create and market the “highest impact” data to your marketing channels.
3. Integration is ready to be achieved.
Good luck and if you would like to make your life a lot simpler, give us a shout at MerchantAdvantage, we would be glad to work with you, and start feeding and having fun with over 100 marketing channels, cost effectively, with the most uptime, least surprises and zero technician’s heart attacks!!
Happy Holidays!
– Chip Arndt
chip@eTaildTail.com
chip@merchantadvantage.com