Ecommerce: Conversion suggestions - e-commerce

I'm a technical person with in-depth knowledge on Python and its framework. I've build an ecommerce store using Django-Oscar. I've multiple products in my store.
My store offers a large assortment of products in the Electronics category. A new and upcoming sub-category is surveillance and security systems. However, due to the varied nature of products in this category, the products are distributed across “Home Security” (Under Appliances) and “Security Systems”, etc. (under the Computers & Laptop > Office Equipment). A better understanding of the market segments is required for better positioning these products.
I reviewed Maplin, another e-store that provides same category of products on its store for better placing of my products.
Since I'm not a business analyst or a sales person, I want to get some recommendations/suggestions on how my e-commerce store can structure the products to increase conversion based on your review of the Maplin Storefront and my own product mix in this category. The constraint is that I cannot create a separate level 1 category for surveillance and security systems.
i tried Google on where should a particular product be placed to increase the conversion rate, but to little fortune. Also, I tried finding other SO portals where this type of question is a fit, but couldn't find any. So, if you can let me know the appropriate portal for this kind of question, it will be of great help!!! You can provide your recommendation/suggestions here as well.
Thanks!!! Appreciate your help!!!

register for google webmaster tools
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
-- then verify your website with google
take a look at google merchant center
https://www.google.com/merchants/
this page has links to google product taxonomy docs with categories etc
https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/160081
amazon is also worth looking at http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200218500
next step would be structured data for the products
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1211158
http://schema.org/Product

Related

When requesting GetMultipleItems is it possible to retrieve discount information?

I am trying to access the special discounts that sellers offer when you buy multiple products from their shop.
I am using GetMultipleItems to get the data on a large set of books and their prices however a lot of the products we buy are a lot cheaper when multiple products are purchased form one seller. I would like to reflect that price in my software so getting these offers from the API would be incredibly useful.
Like in this example
Example offer
If anyone knows of a way to get that data it would be much appreciated.
Edit
After much searching I've found this which is the information I need to get for each listing. But still no ways to get the info in a request.

A single Shopify store for US and Europe, is it possible?

I'm new to Shopify and I'm looking for some guidance.
I have a customer who has a warehouse in the US and a warehouse in Europe. They have a Shopify store for US customers, with a shipping from address set to the warehouse in the US.
They do not have a store for European customers.
What they would like to do, which I'm not sure is possible... Is keep the current US store, and add the ability to ship to Europe. This would require adding prices in Euros, for each product, and adding a second Shipping from address, which does not seem to be an option.
Does anyone have any experience with this, and can provide some guidance on any of these points?
I'd agree with what David said. It is easier and less-tax-hassle free two maintain the store on two domains.
But I can see why you require a multi-currency store. Fortunately, Shopify does have provision to at least display the product prices and offer a toggle switch for the users.
Refer to the following Shopify docs:
Show multiple currencies in a drop-down list on your storefront
Add a button to your online store to enable toggling between two currencies
To do that, you would have to show prices in Euros, but all money would be collected as USD. Not ideal. Plus EU usually has taxes in, US, not. Shipping is easy in that you can control where things get dropshipped from.
It is simpler to just open two shops. One for Euroland, and one for the US Shops are cheap compared to the sweat you'll put in trying to make one store do it all.

Where is the information located in Magento on a sales order for discount information on the API

I just want to start out this post by saying that I am not a programmer, nor do I play one on TV. I have found this site because I have been trying to manage our Magento instance, after pretty much left high and dry by the developers we had building this for us. I will try and explain it the best I can below:
When we apply a shopping cart coupon to the sales order, and the discount is applied to each item, a new line item total is configured by Magento. We then have a connector that takes the information from Magento's API and it is then connected to Open Bravo, which is our ERP accounting software. Open Bravo is grabbing the information as it normally does, however it doesn't see the discount information, so the order total is different in our accounting program then what Magento has. Open Bravo is teling me they need to know where the discounted amount on the sales order in Magento is on the API. It's obviously in a different spot then the standard sales order amount.
I might be able to describe a little better if you hit me with questions. Any help you could provide would be highly appreciated. Maybe we could barter for some office supplies, as that is what we sell.
Thanks!
If you are using Magento API to fetch order information from magento, then below link will be helpful to find actual value.
http://www.magentocommerce.com/api/soap/sales/salesOrder/sales_order.info.html
It seems that your ERP is storing "base_grand_total" value in stead of "grand_total".

Estimate tax based on zip code

Using Google Checkout, I'm able to estimate tax based on the zip code that's assoicated with a user's account when they click "Buy." The user then sees the tax amount when they checkout.
Is it possible to estimate tax based on the user-entered zip code before a user reaches the checkout page? This is similar to the functionality in Google Products currently. I see some data here (http://code.google.com/apis/checkout/articles/Google_Checkout_Articles_Zip_Level_Taxes.html) but am not sure how to implement it within the checkout button I have.
Is there any other tax table or API that allows estimation of taxes based on zip code? Does Paypal offer this functionality?
have you looked at AvaTax module?
http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/one-pica-avatax-connector.html
If your building a cart from scratch you can use avalara's api. If your using a specific package such as magento, 3dcart, or so on they already connect to the major solutions. Avalara's solution also bridges the gap between the sales software and the accounting software such as Quickbooks and Sage.
Otherwise if the company your building this for is small enough and has time to update them manually, you can go to the states website or go to a place that compiles free tax rate tables such as taxrates.com
One major warning with any solution, sales tax taxability rules can be complex, this compounds when your scaling an e-commerce business. Even if your a small business in one state, there are multiple layers to the rules. Best to work talk with an accountant to double check when your initially setting this up.

Is there a way to get details of the product from single insudtry?

I want to maintain a database of all the products or the brands with respect to industry.
For example I need to get information about all the food supplements. How can I get them?
I am not sure all the companies have an API for their products.
Please advise
Uhm,... what kind of information? If you need prices, you can probably get information from goverment sources. At least you can here in Argentina. Other than that, I don't think it's possible, unless you somehow manage to scrape websites of all the brands you want to track.
Speaking as someone who has worked for two data-aggregation companies, aggregating data involves a lot of manual work. You find the sources, you automate the acquisition of data as best you can (APIs, file downloads and imports, even screen scraping from HTML pages), and you stay on top of it constantly. You're always looking for additional sources, updating code for sources that have changed, minding legal implications of sources who don't want you to harvest their data, etc.
Sometimes you have to buy the data, or weigh that cost against not having data from that source or scraping it manually. Sometimes a source will block you in some way and you need to either try to get around that or negotiate some terms with them. It's a viable business model, but it's not cheap.
For some products, Retailigence ( http://www.retailigence.com ) may have data in API form. They basically keep track of local stores' inventory and pricing for certain categories of products.
You should definitely check out Good Guide - an API that gives you access to details on over 60,000 household products.
http://developer.goodguide.com
DailyMed is a good service to check out if you're interested in products in the medical space.
http://dailymed.nlm.nih.gov/dailymed