Would You Like Cross-sell With That? Yahoo! Improves Cross-sell Feature

Most of us have had the experience of being asked whether we want to add fries to a fast food order, add batteries to the purchase of any product that requires them, or to upgrade to a higher end model when selecting frankly anything at an electronics store. These scenarios are common because cross-selling is a great way to encourage the purchase of additional products and increase order size. Today we’re introducing two features to help you improve your cross-sell efforts: auto-suggestions and product page cross-sell.

Cross-sell items displayed on a product page

If you have 10 products, it’s pretty easy to come up with cross-sell rules based on what you know about how those products sell. For example, your birdhouses are often sold along with a bag of bird seed, your first aid kits tend to sell well with lawn darts, etc. However, once your product offering grows, so do the possible product combinations, and it’s unlikely you’ll be able to keep an accurate finger on the pulse of every product’s sales behavior. Let’s say you have a store with an inventory of 20 products. If you decided to cross-sell just 3 items next to each product, you would have over 5000 cross-sell combinations to choose from. Imagine what a store with 200 or even 2000 products would have to do to keep up! This is where our new cross-sell auto-suggestions feature comes in. Using a combination of Yahoo! behavioral targeting technology, past purchase combinations, and past navigation history for your store, you can opt to have products auto-suggested to your shoppers, which reduces the need to set up cross-sell rules for each product.

In this same release, we’re also introducing the ability to cross-sell on product pages. For an online shopper, adding a product to their cart is making a certain level of commitment. Cross-selling in the cart is a good opportunity to suggest additional items that complement the product the shopper has selected. However, as a merchant you shouldn’t have to wait for a shopper to add something to their cart in order to cross-sell them additional or related items. Shoppers who in the past did not add products to their cart may just not have seen the product they were looking for, even if it existed in your store. With cross-sell on product pages, you can capture their interest and show them relevant products that will turn them from browsers to buyers.

Please refer to the Cross-Sell Help documents for more information on this new feature.

Laurie Briggs
Yahoo! Small Business

Note: These new features are available to Standard, Professional and Store merchants who have Checkout Manager enabled.

[Edit--11/01/07: Comments are fixed now. If you don't see your comment or did not receive a reply, please submit them again.--Paul]

[Edit--10/31/07: An issue with our build of WordPress is submitting comments but without any content. We received numerous comments today but without any of the content. Please email store-blog-feedback at yahoo-inc.com to submit any comments or questions.--Paul]

[Edit--10/30/07: It appears that WordPress may be having an issue at the moment with comments. Comments are coming through without any content. Please email store-blog-feedback at yahoo-inc.com to submit any comments or questions. We'll post the comments when the issue is resolved.--Paul]

Help With Choosing Keywords Wisely

What keywords should you use for your search marketing campaign? What about for your title tags, header tags, and within your product content? Identifying the keywords that resonate with your customers can help you with search engine marketing, page optimization for natural search, and even for selecting key phrases in your outbound marketing, all of which are meant to drive more valuable traffic to your site. Today we’re introducing a new tool called Keyword Finder which you can use when making keyword decisions.

Keyword Finder leverages the rich data in your store to your advantage by exposing keyword/product relationships. Three different types of keywords are included in the tool: converting keywords, referring keywords, and product names. Depending on your sales and traffic history, the keywords in the tool will rely more or less heavily on each of these types. Newer merchants are likely to find that the majority of the keywords are derived from product names or referrals while merchants with longer tenure may find that conversions make up the majority of the keywords.

Converting keywords are keyword phrases that have a history of converting to sales. For example, if eight people have come to your site via the keyword “blue umbrella” and purchased the product “‘Rain Rain Go Away’ Umbrella” you know based on its conversion history that the term “blue umbrella” is a pretty good keyword for this product.

Referring keywords are keyword phrases that have driven traffic directly to product pages, regardless of whether they resulted in sales. Taking the same product as an example, let’s say that Keyword Finder shows you that five people arrived on the product page for “‘Rain Rain Go Away’ Umbrella” after searching for the keyword phrase “child’s rain gear,” but there were no conversions for that keyword. This may mean that the phrase “child’s rain gear” isn’t the best keyword phrase for this product. However, it may also mean that you need to do a better job on your product page description to convey that this product is indeed for kids. Also, if you don’t have any conversions for this product yet, a keyword phrase that has referred in the past may be a good keyword to start with – it’s certainly better than guesswork. You can always more finely tune in the future.

Oftentimes, merchants may overlook their product names as keyword phrases because they think they are too specific, but this isn’t always the case. Some product names, like known branded products or book and movie titles, are quite likely to have been searched for in a search engine. Product names with a search history will be included as keyword phrases in the tool where relevant, but will be ranked lower if they haven’t produced any conversions or referrals.

Keyword Finder is meant for repeat use. You will find that the keywords you see will change over time as you gain traffic, orders and change the products you offer. Also, don’t forget that although many SEO improvements are quick (adjusting title tags or adding to the “keywords” field in Catalog Manager, for example) changes to your site can take time to be recognized by search engines – give them a chance to kick in before drawing conclusions and making additional changes. On the other hand, search engine marketing can show almost immediate results, but does require more time to write ads and place bids. Either way, there are plenty of places you can put your newfound keywords to work.

Please refer to the Keyword Finder Help documents for more information on this new feature.

Laurie Briggs
Yahoo! Small Business

Want Customer Insight—Just Ask or What eBags Knows That Others Don’t

I am reading a great book I would recommend to merchants—Web Analytics: An Hour a Day by Avinash Kaushik. In terms of web analytics, Avinash is one of the leading figures and his book as well as blog posts are a great source of some very accessible advice on the difficult topic of web analytics.

One piece of advice Avinash stressed in the book and also in a blog post on customer survey questions, is the importance of qualitative data—in other words what customers are saying about your site and how they feel when shopping there. Analytics can tell you what they bought, when they bought, what they searched on to find your site, what pages they viewed, and even some arcane information such as what resolution their screen was at the time. Analytics can’t tell you they almost left your site before buying and would have if you weren’t offering a coupon promotion for free shipping. Because of this, Avinash rightly stresses the importance of collecting this type of attitudinal data from customers.

A Look at the Top 100

With this in mind I went and looked at some of the sites in the top 100 Internet Retailer. To my surprise I did not find many examples. Now it is possible or even highly likely that these mega merchants, many of whom have retail locations (Target, Walmart, Staples, Williams-Sonoma, and other) and undoubtedly massive marketing departments, are collecting this same data in focus groups or usability testing sessions, but it was still surprising to find so few examples. Why not ask your customers what they think right on your web site?

Crate & Barrel has a feedback link that appears in the footer of their pages just below the email sign-up form. This opens a pop-up with a few questions (see below).

Crate & Barrel feedback form

While Crate & Barrel is smart for collecting this information on site when many other top retailers don’t appear to be (at least not with prominent links in global locations of the site), I wonder about the quality of feedback they are getting with such an open-ended form and by asking for multiple pieces of information even if marked optional; they are collecting a quantitative rating as well though which seems smart.

The best example I came across which appears not in a pop-up but right in the footer of the page was eBags.

eBags feedback form

The message appearing with the form makes it very clear what information they hope to collect. They are asking in a customer-focused way for the products customers want to buy and the language they would need to see to aid in making the sale.

If this seems like a good way to collect feedback from your customers, it’s fairly easy to create form and use a cgi script which we provide already to collect this data and send it to an email address you specify. Then you can add the HTML for the form to the final-text field or a custom field if you have custom templates.

In terms of processing the feedback, I would recommend creating an alias such as feedback@yourdomain.com and then forwarding messages to the appropriate people in your organization to act upon. Now all of the feedback you collect may not be something you can act upon, but there will likely be some invaluable nuggets of information you can use to expand product content to address buyer concern, add new related products you don’t carry, or help establish trust with buyers. If you have employees that handle customer calls you may want them to use the same or a custom-built form within their CRM tools to collect this same feedback. Your goal should be to try and learn something new with each customer touchpoint.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

P.S. Avinash is donating all of his proceeds from his book to two charities: The Smile Train and Doctors without Borders so if that plus all the great insight don’t encourage you to buy the book, I’m not sure what will. And yes he is that nice of a guy to do so.

Speed up the publish time of your store

The following post comes courtesy of Istvan Siposs, Yahoo! Store developer, RTML guru, and author of several invaluable guides for merchants such as the Yahoo! Store Tips & Tricks 2nd edition, and RTML 101: The Unofficial Guide to Yahoo! Store Templates. The post is recommended for merchants with some understanding and experience with RTML.

Recently I did a complete redesign in a store. As part of the redesign, I added a hierarchical, DHTML menu navigation bar to the site. In a typical setup, such a navigation bar works like this: use WITH-OBJECT :index to reference the home page, then cycle through the contents field, create a menu label for each page you find there, and for any such page, create a sub-menu if the page also has contents.

If you didn’t know until now, whenever you reference another object in RTML, such as using WITH-OBJECT or FOR-EACH-OBJECT, such a reference causes a disk lookup on the server. This is what we call an “expensive” operator; it is expensive in terms of processing power and time, so a navigation bar in general, and a hierarchical navigation bar in particular is an “expensive” template.

In the store I was working in, they had over 4,000 pages, and of course, each of those pages had the navigation bar on them. So not surprisingly, the time it took to publish this site went from a couple of minutes to 3-4 hours!

ONCE to the rescue

There are many ways to write good, efficient, and bad inefficient RTML code, but regardless of your coding style, there is one operator you should consider every time you write a piece of code that won’t change from page to page, and it is the ONCE operator.

ONCE takes one parameter, which can be either :page or :publish. What it means is that whatever you paste within ONCE will be evaluated only once per page or per publish. Now, per page is not that interesting (I think at least, I haven’t really found any use for that,) but per publish is great.

When you use ONCE :publish, the expressions pasted inside it are evaluated only once during publishing. So how can you speed up your navigation bar? The immediate idea is to simply paste your original navigation code inside a ONCE :publish. Ok, try it, and you’ll be quite surprised: your navigation bar will appear only on a single page, the first one that was generated during your publish. Not exactly what you want, but if you think about what ONCE does, it does make sense: you asked it to generate your navigation bar once per publish. To get the speed benefits of ONCE :publish and also end up with a navigation bar on every page, do the following small variation:


TEXT ONCE :publish

Now this will do the trick nicely! We still generate the navigation bar once per publish, but now the result is saved (GRABbed) and output on each page!

With this simple trick, my store’s publish time went back to about 5-10 minutes.

I use this trick all the time for pieces of the page that doesn’t have to change throughout the site. It works nicely for banners, footers, random testimonials, etc. You can use the above code snippet as a boiler plate, just put the code that needs to be evaluated once inside the GRAB operator and you’ll be all set. Be careful though, don’t do this to code that changes from page to page (for example, you cannot use this trick if your navigation bar changes based on which main category you are in.)

Editor still slow?

Ok, you’ve tried it, publish time is great, but your editor is slow. Chances are you have some inefficient RTML code in your templates, and if that’s the case, ONCE will not save you anything there. Why? Because when you are in the editor, you are essentially publishing each page every time you view a page! Not the entire store (of course), but viewing any page in the editor is a “mini publish” of that page. So if you take my DHTML menu example above, that menu needs to be re-generated in the editor every time you view a page. One way to speed up the editor is to turn off slow pieces of code while in the editor. For example, you can program your template so that it does not show a navigation bar while in the editor (in the editor, you can still navigate in other means, like a bottom of page text navigation, breadcrumbs, or clicking the “Contents” button.)

It is easy enough to turn off any piece of RTML code by using the WHEN operator. You can, for example, create a custom yes-no variable called “in-editor”, and then take your existing site navigation and stuff it inside a WHEN @in-editor operator. This will do the trick, simply set in-editor to Yes while you are working in the editor, and set it to No before publishing.

There are two problems with this approach though: one, you have to manually do this all the time you are working in the editor, and two, you or someone at your organization might accidentally publish the store with that setting set to Yes. Then, your live site will end up with no navigation. So what to do?

With a little trick, instead of using a custom variable, let the editor tell you whether your code is running in the editor or not! Create the following template:


is-editor

Once you have this template, use it instead of a custom variable to disable pieces of code in the editor like this:


WHEN NOT CALL :is-editor

... and disabled inside the editor

But how do I navigate?

There are many other ways to navigate your store besides using the store’s navigation bar. You can use the “Contents” page in the Advanced Editor, or use the footer text links (if you have those), or breadcrumbs. Or, if you know the ID of the page you want to edit, you can erase the last piece (after the last / character) of the address in the browser’s address box, and replace it with the page Id plus the .html extension. For example, if you want to go to the site map page, and the address in your editor’s address bar looks like this (more or less):

http://us-f4-edit.store.yahoo.com/RT/NEWEDIT.storeid/d49f35bb5d6b/C7FwkAAB

then replace the bolded part with ind.html and hit Enter like this:

http://us-f4-edit.store.yahoo.com/RT/NEWEDIT.storeid/d49f35bb5d/ind.html

Istvan Siposs,
Guest blogger for Yahoo! Small Business