Choosing Product Codes or Item Numbers

If you're building your first ecommerce site, the idea of choosing a convention for your product codes may seem like a trivial task. After all, the product code is typically something that is primarily internal to your business, so what difference does the format make to your customers? The answer is, probably none. But it could make a huge difference on how you manage your stock, your customer service, your sales, and your marketing.

One of the first considerations is whether your shopping cart builds URLs based on your product codes. For example, Miva Merchant's default urls to product pages contain the product code as part of the querystring. Consider this example:

Note the last part of the URL - "ABC123". That is the code for our hypothetical product. Now, consider what the URL might look like if you employ URL-rewriting strategies as part of your SEO work:

Although SEO experts still heavily debate the benefit of having keywords in your URLs, you can see how replacing "ABC123" with a keyword-based product code, such as "coiled-garden-hose" could give you a search engine boost!

That's how we started life with our toy store WonderBrains. Our product codes included "4-childrens-card-games","magnetic-poetry-original-kit", and other keyword-based product codes along those same lines. This gave WonderBrains a search engine boost at the time (and I feel they still have some positive effect now). However, we quickly ran up against filename limits. Miva Merchant supports 50 characters for its product codes, but QuickBooks only supports 31. That caused some issues when we tried to synchronize inventory levels between the two systems, because Quickbooks truncated any product codes longer than 31 characters. Later, we introduced Photoshop actions to batch-process images, and discovered a 27-character limit when saving files (until we discovered the value of unchecking the Mac OS compatibility flag).

Another consideration we had was the fact that we wanted to introduce a catalog in 2008. That meant phone orders. It didn't make sense for customers to call in and ask to order item "calico dash critters dash deluxe dash village dash house"! This was another justification for shorter product codes. We decided to go ahead and bite the bullet and change the product codes on over 2000 items.

We settled on a format consisting of a two-letter prefix followed by 6 digits. The two characters uniquely represent a vendor. Putting these first allow us to sort our picklist by product code, and end up with a picklist where items from each vendor are grouped together (based on that 2-letter prefix). Since our warehouse is organized by vendor, that made picking items much quicker - an immediate payoff. The new format also solved the problem of synchronizing inventory levels between Miva Merchant and Quickbooks, and we switched to Easy Inventory Update to make that task go a lot smoother. The new format will also allow customers to more easily order an item by phone when the catalog is released later this year.

Whatever format you choose, there can be a lot of effects down the road among the various systems you will need to run your business. Consider not only your shopping cart, but also your fulfillment software, your CRM package, your customer needs, your warehouse, or anything else that could be affected by the format. It's easiest to get it right the first time, then it is to change it after your catalog has grown to a large size and your site has taken a firm hold in the search engines!

Building Authority and Inbound Links with Squidoo

An interesting semi-SEO tactic that has become popular over the past year in Squidoo. Squidoo is a site where people can publish a webpage about a topic they feel knowledgeable about. Pages are called "lenses", and authors are called "lensmasters". You can write a Squidoo lens on almost any topic of your choosing! So how about one related to the products you sell?

When you create a lens, you have a number of modules you can add to the lens to create your content. The basic text comes in the form of the Text/Write module. Use this module to enter a paragraph of text that will appear on your lens. Other modules include a link list, and RSS feed (which displays headlines, snippets, and/or full posts from a given RSS feed), Amazon (which links to related books), del.icio.us bookmarks, YouTube videos, a guestbook, and many more.

Unfortunately, the potential of Squidoo for SEO has attracted tons of SEO spammers, creating dozens of lenses that offer little or no value to the Squidoo community. It doesn't make a lot of sense - a Squidoo lens has to be promoted just like any other web page. But the hype has attracted these types, so a controversy has arisen about the use of Squidoo for SEO and about Squidoo's value in general. In fact, during the summer of 2007, Squidoo lenses stopped appearing in Google's SERPs (search engine results pages) almost completely, though the reasons are speculated to be unrelated to Squidoo's spam. More recently, Squidoo lenses are again appearing near to top of Google search results for certain phrases. In fact, at the time of this writing, a lens is #1 for the Google search on "laptop bags".

So how do you create a Squidoo lens the right way? Commit some of your time and effort to create a truly valuable page. Offer unique, hand-written content that is meant to inform, not just to promote your business. Once you've created a page, begin to promote it. Some ideas direct from Squidoo: Mention it in your blog, link to it from your facebook or myspace profiles, join a related Squidoo group, and even enter it into the Lens of the Day contest if you think it's good enough.

And of course, don't forget to link to your website from your Squidoo page!

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