The better way to sell online

Avoid customer frustration by staying current

Are you regularly updating your shop landing pages and products? If you answered “no” to the above, it's time to get cracking!

Are you regularly updating your shop landing pages and products?

If you answered “no” to the above, it's time to get cracking!

Your customers and search engines want to see new content and updated pages regularly. If you are not updating your site pages, content and products - you will be disappointing the two most important driving factors for your online business.

Let's take a moment to think about real brick and mortar stores. They regularly re-merchandise and advertise for seasonal goods and holidays to keep the shopping experience fresh. You can quite often walk into a store one month — then find the following month that their store layout has slightly changed. It's the old marketing gimmick of putting new products, best selling, feature products and door crashers right at the front door to push those "impulse buyers" into a quick sale.

With ShopFactory 9, you have similar tools right at your fingertips. Your home page is the easiest and most effective page to update regularly. Even if you only spend half an hour on it a month, you can quickly move feature products in and out of the home page with-in seconds, and republish. You can also easily move top sellers in and out of the home page by simply dragging from your product listing. You should also change out your home page highlight images and update paragraph text to keep it fresh depending on the season or if a holiday is just around the corner.

With-in the ShopFactory "Custom Design Editor", you can also change your header and shop colors with a few simple clicks of the mouse button. ShopFactory Gold allows you to save your theme designs for later use, and reuse seasonal themes over and over again. Of course, you can simply swap out one of those saved themes at various points in the year, depending on the season or holiday needs. Then change it back again to your main shop design when that event is over. It only takes a few seconds to republish your store for different event changes!

Housekeeping is a major part of keeping your shop up to date. Regularly reviewing your products and removing outdated, or discontinued items can be done quite quickly. You can simply "disable" or hide a product, or remove the cart functions altogether when a product is no longer available. You should either delete or move discontinued products completely. But, if you have products you only sell in and out of season, you can simply remove them from pages on your site, and leave them in your product listings to quickly update and use them again at a later date should the need arise.

As an alternative, say you sell collectibles or coins, you can disable the price and cart functions when you sell out, and still leave the product live on your site. The product can still be found on search engines to get traffic into your site. And, if you then end up buying more of that item - you can simply re-enable the buying and pricing for that product with-in a matter of seconds!

For more information on hiding or disabling products, please see this article on our FAQ

Housekeeping on landing or content pages is also something you should do regularly. You can Simply hide pages, or if you continue to get traffic on old outdated pages, you can drag and drop them into your "Extras" folder inside ShopFactory. That way they will still be active and accessible pages on your site, but will not show up in your index 1 or 2 navigation. This way you can add new content and landing pages to keep your site fresh for your visitors and the Search Engines alike!

There is also a hidden time saving tool which works for you in the background, which you might not have considered. ShopFactory updates your sitemap.xml for the search engines automatically. This save you the effort of re-submitting your pages to the search engines. The sitemap.xml, if you have first originally submitted it to the search engines, is visited regularly by Google, Bing/Yahoo. The Search engines automatically download it and look for changes to reindex on your site. You don't have to do anything other than re-publish your site! That's it, the sitemap.xml is live and any new pages are included. "Updated" pages are listed in the date formatting of the sitemap.xml file, so the search engine will know to visit and re-index those pages or products.

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