As you begin your Retail Ecommerce Integration Project, you'll want to think through how you are currently creating and maintaining your product set. Below are helpful tips for prepping your data for upload to your website.
1. Avoid Duplicate Web Names
It is CRITICAL from a website SEO perspective and an online shopping experience that ALL e-commerce products have a unique website name. This makes it easier for shoppers to find what they are looking for and not be confused about multiple products with the same name and benefits SEO.
For products with duplicate names, it is recommended to modify one or all of the duplicates to make the names unique. If the character limit on the field makes this difficult, consider using the custom Web Name field, which has no character limit.
2. Check the E-commerce Checkbox
Check the e-commerce checkbox in CounterPoint for all products that should be available on the website. This e-commerce checkbox is located on the ecommerce tab of the product record.
3. Product Requirement Review
Confirm your products meet all of the requirements to be uploaded to your preferred website. For example, BigCommerce requires that a product have:
- product name
- product category
- product weight
- price
4. Product Category Assignment
Typically, ecommerce categories assigned in Counterpoint are used to create and populate the navigation and categories on your website. It is very important to have each of your ecommerce products assigned to an ecommerce category because without a category, customers will not be able to find your products by browsing using the navigation.
Note: ecommerce category creation and assignment can also be managed holistically on the website itself and would bypass CounterPoint ecommerce category assignment.
You can access the ecommerce category tree in Counterpoint by navigating to Setup > Ecommerce > Categories. This will display your category tree and allow you to add individual items or bulk add multiple items to categories.
If your Category tree has not been set up yet, consider consulting with your Web Developer or an SEO expert to help determine the most logical and SEO friendly category structure for your website.
5. Audit All Ecommerce Product Data
Audit all your product data for missing values or misspelled values. Often times the primary vendor or brand information is a good place to start.