Finding Great Products to Sell Made Easier

Finding Great Products to Sell Made Easier

I’ve been working on a very interesting feature lately, which has launched without much fanfare, but is really cool.

Long time users of the Shopster E-Commerce platform can acknowledge that finding products from our huge virtual warehouse has been a challenge in the past. You could spend every second for an entire year (without sleeping) looking at each product and still not see everything (at only 10 seconds a product).

Under the new Merchant Network model, you choose the suppliers who have products you are interested in. Based on your local context, Shopster now generates daily the list of new products added, and products which have dropped in price.

This means, within 24 hours (or less) of a supplier making a new product available, you can have that product available for sale in your store, or for drop shipping.

How it works:
1. Supplier makes a new product available on their website.
2. Shopster picks up that new product (as fast as within 1 hour for some suppliers) and makes it available to you in our warehouse.
3. Every morning, the system finds all new products added by suppliers in your network, and generates a Network Activity message for you.
4. Next time you log in, under Network Activity, you will see a new message like:
Audio, Mobile, Gaming and More has added 12 new products.
5. Clicking on the link takes you straight to the 12 new products, where you can instantly add them to your store, or purchase them for drop shipping.

With this level of automation, you can be one of the first (if not THE FIRST), person to have that product for sale on the entire internet.

Try adding Books, DVDs, CDs and Video Games or Audio, Mobile, Gaming and More to your network to see this feature in action.

Currently, Network Activity informs you of new products, price drops, and partner updates to their profiles, with more to come.

If you haven't signed up with Shopster yet, you can still test out this feature with a free account.

Latest Shopster Release

Ahh.. Friday afternoon after a mid-week launch. The perfect time to reflect on what went right, what went wrong, and what can wait till Monday... :)

So, in case you haven't received the latest Shopster Newsletter, a major release went out mid this week. I worked on two key features, the ability to export order data out of the Shopster system, and into your own data analysis application (a.k.a. Excel), and the ability to reactivate your account.

Before now, to reactivate your Shopster account, you had to call customer support. Now, you can do so by simply trying to log in again with your email address and password. The system will tell you if your account is currently cancelled, and ask you if you want to reactivate.

Currently, if you reactivate through the automated system, you get an additional 1 week trial. Note that there is a limit on the number of times you are allowed to reactivate, so please don't abuse this system thinking you can cancel and reactivate every week for free service.

For the order export utility, we had to made some hard decisions in how the data should be formatted for export. Currently, the system lets you export order data out for the last 3 months. You can choose to export out in Excel, PDF, or comma delimited format (CSV). An interesting report is the Product Statistics report which gives you summary product information over all your orders in a given month. If this feature is well received, I hope to be able to offer more analytical reports for export, rather than just raw data.

For the first time, a Shopster e-Commerce subscriber can export out their customer's full information related to an order, including the email address, billing and shipping addresses, and contact information.

If you are a e-Commerce subscriber, the reports are available through:
Storefront Channel, Manage Store, Download Reports

If you are a Product Source subscriber, the reports are available through:
Product Export Channel (or eBay Channel), Manage Orders, Download Reports

Now that the release is out the door, I'm going to have to address the backlog of business intelligence requests sitting in my Inbox.

Increase RShop Traffic with Sitemaps

Updated Oct. 17th, 2008: Good news! There is now a feature within Shopster to general the sitemap.xml file for you. After logging in, go to Promote Store, Submit to Search Engines

RShops and Sitemaps

One of the toughest problems you'll face in creating a profitable RShop is generating traffic to your website. The first step is to make sure Google, Yahoo, and all other search engines are aware of your site. That way, if a person is using Google to search for products, there is a chance your RShop will be in the search results.

Google, Yahoo, and MSN Live become aware of new web sites by following links from existing pages. Unless you've linked to your new RShop from a personal website or blog, and a search engine has followed the link to your RShop, your RShop may be never been found by the search engines.

Creating and uploading a Sitemap solves this problem. A Sitemap is a file which contains all the links in your website. You manually direct a search engine to your Sitemap file. Best of all, it's free!

While not technically difficult, there a number of steps to use a Sitemap.

1. Register a search engine account (i.e. www.google.com).
   
2. Verify your RShop with the Search Engine.
   
3. Generate and Upload the Sitemap file to your RShop.
   
4. Get the Search Engine to Read the Sitemap File.
   

For my example, I will use www.google.com. At the end of the post are links to other search engines which can also read Sitemap files.

Step 1: Register a Search Engine Account

1. Go to Google's Webmaster Tools page (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/)
   
2. If you don't have a Google account, you'll have to create one.
   

Step 2: Verify your RShop with the Search Engine
While not technically a prerequisite for Steps 3 & 4, the first thing you should do it verify you are the owner of the RShop. This will let you see if your site is currently indexed by Google or not.

1. Login to Google's Webmaster Tools (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/)
   
2. On the Dashboard page (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dashboard) under Sites, add your RShop's site. For example: 'thryva.secure2u.com'
   
3. Under Next Step, click the Verify your Site link. (The same link is also available on the Dashboard page next to your site's name.)
   
4. The page will say, Verification status: NOT VERIFIED.
   
5. For 'Choose verification method..' choose the Upload an HTML file.
   
6. Open Notepad, or any other text editor, and save a empty file with a file name specified by Google. Mine looks like "googleced35171b031861b.html". What is important is the file name, and not the actual contents of the file (it makes no different if the file is empty or not).
   
7. Open a new browser (will be returning to the current page later), and log in to your Shopster account (http://service.shopster.com/).
   
8. In the top navigation bar, click the EDIT RSHOP link.
   
9. From the left navigation panel, click the RShop Settings label to expand the menu choices.
   
10. Click the File Manager link.
    
11. You show now be on the RShop Settings: File Manager page. If you aren't, cheat by pasting this URL in your browser (http://service.shopster.com/retailer/designer/managefiles.aspx).
    
12. Make sure under the Current Folder panel, you see "/ Root /". If it is longer than this, make sure to click the Root link.
    
13. Under the Files panel, click the Browse button, and select the file you created in Step 5 (the empty file whose name is like 'googleced35171b031861b.html').
    
14. Click Open and the path to the file should now be in the text box to the left of the Browse button.
    
15. Click Upload File link to the right of the Browse button.
    
16. Your verification HTML file is now uploaded.
    
17. Switch back to your original browser displaying the Google Webmaster Tools - Verify a Site page.
    
18. Click Verify.
    
19. If all went smoothly, your RShop should be verified. You can check this by going back to the Dashboard page and looking at the Verified? column. It should be a green checkmark.
    

Step 3: Generate and Upload the Sitemap file to your RShop
I'm ashamed to admit Shopster does not generate this file for you. You'll have to user a third party tool. I used xml-sitemaps.com.

1. One xml-sitemaps.com home page, in the Starting URL text box, enter in your RShop's URL. In my case, 'http://thryva.secure2u.com/'.
   
2. I choose Change frequency to 'Monthly', but choose what most actively describes how often you will be updated your RShop.
   
3. Leave default choices for the rest of the options and click 'Start'.
   
4. Note that the 'free' version of their generator will only allow up to 500 pages.
   
5. Once it finishes, download the sitemap.xml file to your computer.
   
6. If you have more than one RShop, you should name the file to -sitemap.xml, because the files you upload to your RShops are stored in the same directory, and you will need one sitemap file for each RShop.
   
7. You will now want to upload the Sitemap file to your RShop exactly in the same way you uploaded your verification HTML file in the previous set of instructions. (go to http://service.shopster.com/retailer/designer/managefiles.aspx and upload file to root directory).
   

Step 4: Get the Search Engine to Read the Sitemap File
By this step, you have now verified your RShop with the search engine, and make available a Sitemap file available on your RShop.

1. Log in to Google's Webmaster Tools. (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/)
   
2. From the Dashboard, choose your RShop's site and under the Sitemap column click Add link.
   
3. For 'Choose Type...' choose Add General Web Sitemap.
   
4. In the text box, enter the file name of the Sitemap you uploaded to your RShop. This is either 'sitemap.xml' or '-sitemap.xml'.
   
5. Click the 'Add General Web Sitemap button'
   
6. Google should now tell you your Sitemap status is 'Pending'. Google will eventually use your sitemap to add your RShop to its search engine. Once done, you can use Webmaster Tools to see how your site is being found through Google searches.
   

Now that you have a Sitemap for your RShop, you should let the other search engines know about it. Here are some links:
Yahoo! Site Explorer (https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit)
Microsoft's MSN Search (http://webmaster.live.com/)
Ask.com (http://about.ask.com/en/docs/about/webmasters.shtml#22)

Blogspot versus Vox

I must say Vox is much easier to use. Uploading of pictures, formatting of the posts. For the last post, I had to do some manual HTML coding. Crazy.

That said, blogspot seems to be much better for SEO and ranking stuff. Google Analytics is really wicked. You know, I always thought that Search Engine Optimization was some mystical art form. It's not. Want a good ranking when people search for 'shopster blog' in Google? Put 'shopsterblog' in your URL (shopsterblog.blogspot.com), and host your blog on the preferred blog platform of Google.

I mean it's crazy, on Vox I had routine posts about Shopster since January, and I didn't make it past 7th on the Google rankings. With just the one post before here on Shopster's Insider's Blog, I already jumped up to 4th.

So long Vox, Hello Blogger!

'Oh, hello, American investor. I see you are interested in distributing Shopster in you home prefecture. You have chosen wisely.'

This blog is a continuation of 'Shopster, Babies, and Bah!' blog over at synch.vox.com. It's all about touting my own horn, giving an insider's view into Shopster, as well as some personal posts now and then.

Here's the first 'manifesto' post from the previous blog:

---
January 13th, 2007

Between Shopster and the baby, this may be the most interesting year of my entire life.
At Shopster, we are starting to garner some interest and some press now. Well, I shouldn't say we, I should say, the 'Top 3'. If you see a picture of three people in a magazine article about Shopster, that's my arm at the side in the frame, or possibly the back of my head if they did an 'action' shot, with employees in the background.

Alas, if my name is to be recorded in the annuals of computer history beside Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and, um, that Moore guy that got his own law, my greatness will have to be touted by one lone horn, this voximighty blog. (Moore's lesser known, but equally accurate law: "My sexiness will double every 24 months." It really seems to work for him, either that, or his net worth of 3.7 billion dollars. You know, either / or.)

By the way, as the first employee of Shopster, I have stock options, so if you are making investing decisions based on this blog, well, don't. And two, you can't really jump start an alien spaceship by attaching electrodes to a bunny rabbit's ears. I know, cause it says 'dramatization' right at the bottom of the commercial. At most, you'd get a really angry bunny, and nobody wants that.