I am currently in the process of transferring one of my cleints from the channeladvisor application to a brand spanking new website designed and developed by Frooition. Setting up a website from scratch is a pain, but here are a few tips to make sure you can speed up the transition, and maybe improve your processes from the last website set up.
1. Make sure you use a unique SKU or product code relevant to your product.
2. Make sure your images are named according to the SKU. Example L1008 for the SKU and L1008.jpg for the picture. This means when it comes to submitting to feeds, exporting and manipulating your inventory you can use the concatenate function in excel to fill in your images.
3. Make sure you transfer your meta description, keywords and HTML for some consistency in search engines, or build on it if you think it is lacking
4. Review your postage prices and options. Too often sellers ignore increases in postage, as its a pain to update.
5. Finally create that FAQ page!
6. Take a look at your website navigation, can you improve the customer experience by shifting around your categories? Re organising inventory is something I used to try to avoid as a seller, but while you are transitioning you night as well do the work.
7. New Options? Does your new website have new functionality? Try to make sure you inventory fits in, and uses this new functionality as that’s why you changed right?
8. Remember that if you use the cname function for your domains you can expect a down time of up to 72 hours while the name transfers, so keep the old website going until you are confident that all your domains are pointing correctly.
9. Do a stock take. You might as well, you have done the export, why not check?
10. Review your payment methods and gateways. Does your new website have more options for you?
11. Remember to transfer your Google Analytics code!
There are more but there is the first 11 I encountered today. Before you go live with ANY new e-commerce system, place a few test orders to iron out bugs and settings errors. With a new system, your processes might change a little for your business so always make sure you are ready for them before you go live. If you are unsure what anything does in your new system, always ask or search though the relevant documentation.
This is the site I am currently working on http://my.frooition.com/050014/index.php and I hope to have everything done and dusted for the end of the month. Sue is a niche seller of small ladies Italian leather shoes, based locally.
