Let’s say you’re an online retailer selling a variety of products, and the only navigation option on your website is “Shop.” With no further breakdowns or filters, shopping your website is overwhelming and frustrating.

A clean design and easy-to-follow navigation is one way to help website visitors find your products without getting frustrated. Another often overlooked step is streamlined and intuitive product categories.

Products grouped by category help customers find what they’re looking for. Your products could be categorized by product type (“candles” or “frames”), by room (“living room” or “kitchen”), by mood (“cozy comforts”), or by color (“blue” or “earth-tones”).

Once you’ve created product categories that make sense for your offerings and audience, how do you make a great category page? To help you brainstorm, we’re sharing creative features we love on product category pages.

Continue reading 4 Features That Turn “Eh” Product Category Pages to “Yeah!” →

User experience (UX) is a vital component of every successful website. A poorly designed website is disastrous for brand credibility. Users decide within seconds whether to stay on your site, or abandon for an alternative, based on design and experience.

In fact, a Forrester study found well-designed user interface could raise your website’s conversion rate by up to a 200% and a better UX design could yield conversion rates up to 400%.

User testing, the process of watching and listening to users while they interact with your website, helps get UX right and allows you to stay ahead of your competition. User testing should occur before the project starts, during development phases, and after project completion. This exercise unearths site issues, like broken links, complicated navigation, or confusing checkout processes.

By identifying what works and what doesn’t early-on, you gain guidance, inspiration, validation, and discover areas of improvement, ultimately reducing development time and user friction. Ready to add user testing to your website development and maintenance strategy? Get started with our 5 tips for successful user experience testing.

Continue reading Web Tip – 5 Tips for Successful User Experience Testing →

Our Holiday Website Inspiration Gallery shows you how big brands updated their site last year to engage and convert gift seekers.

We hope you get holiday promotion ideas to try out on your own website!  (If you need specifics, read our 4 Website Tweaks to Convert Holiday Shoppers.)

Don’t miss out on Amazon Prime Day! This year, Amazon Prime Day begins Monday, July 10 at 6 p.m. and lasts until Wednesday, July 12 at 12 a.m.

It’s time to get your products ready for the busiest shopping day of the year. Today, we’ll walk through five quick tips to optimize your products for Amazon Prime Day.

What is Amazon Prime Day?

Introduced in July 2015, Amazon Prime Day boasts considerable discounts on tons of products, like Kindle e-readers, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Echo speakers, and more.

More than 90,000 TVs and two million toys were sold on Amazon Prime Day 2016, doubling sales from 2015 and receiving the “biggest day ever” praise of one online retailer.

Amazon Prime Day features three types of deals – Spotlight deals, Lightning deals, and Savings and Steals. Spotlight deals are the best deals of the day, and Lightning deals are only available for a limited time. New deals are released every five minutes.

Amazon Prime Day is exclusive to Prime members. To take part in the deals, sign up for a free, 30-day trial (just don’t forget to cancel it afterwards if you don’t want to retain your membership). Continue reading Web Tip – 5 Tips to Boost Sales on Amazon Prime Day →

Whereoware clients, prospects, and industry friends frequently ask about our technology partners, and why we chose them.

Today, we’re giving a shout out to our CMS and commerce vendor pal Episerver.

See how Episerver played a part in bringing Whereoware’s vision to fruition, and why the experts are taking notice.

Seeking: A Personalization Partner

As a website design and development agency, Whereoware is always on the lookout for technology partners, platforms, applications, and tools to expand our solutions and capabilities. We have a diverse client base, so we employ a wide-breadth of technical talent and cross-platform expertise, rather than limiting ourselves to just one platform or tool.

In 2013, Whereoware was seeking a CMS partner to help bring our vision to life: combining automation, analytics, and personalization to build authentic relationships online.

As brands upped their online game with personalized services and offers (COUGH Amazon), all consumers would expect these hyper-relevant and personalized online experiences. (My shopping experience is so simple on Amazon – why can’t it be this easy everywhere?)

We wanted to bridge the experience gap – helping clients create the same simple, pleasant, personal, and genuine interactions online they achieved offline (and vice versa).

We had extensive expertise in automation and personalization, but were seeking a simple and intuitive, cloud-based platform that’d let us deliver a holistic, personalized user experience from email, mobile, and digital ads, to the e-commerce and content-based websites we built and designed for clients.

Enter Episerver

Whereoware ultimately partnered with Episerver, a global provider of a single platform to smartly manage digital content, commerce, and marketing in the cloud.

Episerver balances commerce and content in a flexible, cloud-based platform. They’re uniquely well-versed in B2B and B2C e-commerce business requirements, and those of Service companies.

Episerver is flexible and agile enough to integrate with our automation platforms and other third-party tools. We also loved that it was exceedingly simple to use; letting marketers drag and drop products or messaging to create targeted product pages, or develop hyper-personal visitor groups, in minutes.

We’ve had considerable success using Episerver to build personalized e-commerce and CMS websites for clients. Check out a sample site from Mud Pie.

In the News

We’re not the only ones praising Episerver recently. Check out what the experts are saying in some recent press below:

• 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce. The Gartner Magic Quadrant report evaluates 21 providers of digital commerce platforms to provide context and clarity to organizations considering vendors and platforms. Gartner named Episerver a “Challenger” and awarded top marks for the critical capabilities of Agility, Customer Experience, Time to Productivity, and Total Cost of Ownership. Read the full report here.

• The Forrester Wave™: Web Content Management Systems, Q1 2017. This report evaluates web content management systems providers based on their current offering, strategy, and market presence. Episerver was included as one of the 15 most significant web content management systems, and categorized as a Leader for its core web CMS extensibility and architecture, testing, and personalization functionality. Read the full report here.

Want More Info on Episerver and Whereoware?

Whereoware is a longstanding Episerver partner. In recent years, we’ve won Episerver’s 2016 North American Ascender of the Year award, 2015 Commerce Site of the Year award, and 2014 Best Digital Marketing Site award. See examples of our work here.

Want to talk about Episerver and Whereoware’s combined capabilities? Reach out to us.

When you’re developing a content piece, website, or email, your audience sometimes morphs into faceless figures, instead of the real, everyday people you’re trying to reach.

To engage real people, you need to tailor your messages and incentives to be relevant to their individual needs, address their concerns, demonstrate your value, and persuade them to convert (all at an appropriate time in their purchase cycle and without being too aggressive or annoying).

Luckily, developing user personas – mapping out fictional characters representing your core audience – helps you engage individuals with the right approach, timing, and messaging to move them down the conversion path. (Our Persona Worksheet makes mapping our personas easy! Get it below.)

User personas work

User personas help you personalize interactions with your customers + personalization simply works:

How to build actionable user personas

Identify characteristics that offer insight about customers and factors driving their decision making. The goal is to group similar customer representations together, until you’re left with a manageable number of personas, representing about 80% of your audience (3-5, depending on your organization’s size).

When developing user personas, you must collect actionable information that tells you something about the person, so you can respond to their behavior with persuasive, impactful marketing.

Remember, you’re trying to understand intangibles like motivations, concerns, turn-offs, and position in the buyer lifecycle, as well as tangibles like location, age, and education level, to paint a clear and divisive picture of the different types of people making up your core audience. You must also plan how you’ll identify these personas in your various channels (website, email, mobile push, etc.) to deliver the right content.

Continue reading Persona Worksheet – 4 Steps to Actionable User Personas →

Like OZ behind the curtain, product data files aren’t seen by end users, but power everything: our websites, third-party marketplaces, digital catalogs, fulfillment and operations, and more.

Product data files are integral to smooth internal/external operations, a pleasant end user experience, and sales success. The pitfall is they’re overwhelming and time consuming for marketers to consistently update and maintain across all digital channels.

Marketers rarely maintain just one either. In today’s omni channel world, companies aren’t only selling products through their website, digital catalogs, sales reps, or brick and mortar stores. Now, many brands also sell products on third-party marketplaces, like Amazon, Zulily, Wayfair, Google Shopping, and more.

The third-party marketplaces each require their own product data file. Yet the data in every file must be accurate, up-to-date, and compelling, since this information dictates how a product is displayed and marketed to the public.

Inaccuracies in product data means inaccuracies on webpages, wreaking havoc on site visitors’ brand perception and eroding credibility. In fact, a study from Episerver found that “98% of all shoppers have decided against buying due to errors in a retailer’s site content.”

Luckily, there are tools out there, called Product Information Management (PIM) systems,  that stop this manual product maintenance madness.

Today, we’ll talk through product data challenges, and how a PIM system can revolutionize the product data management process.

How is Product Data Used?

Just about everything a website visitor sees on a product page is pulled directly from a product data file. This Wayfair example below demonstrates a typical product data file, and how it drives the final webpage.

Examples of fields that may be in a product data file include:

• Product category
• Product name
• Item number
• Size specs
• Images and alternate images
• Product descriptions
• Designer
• Weight and dimensions
• Shipping options
• Availability

This data is imported into our website and third-party marketplaces on a regular basis, and automatically changes how information is displayed to end users.

Product Data File Challenges

For too many marketers, product data is housed in multiple formats, with more than one person responsible for managing and updating it.

Perhaps image files are stored on a thumb drive or Dropbox, and product descriptions, titles, SKUs, and more are in an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system or plain old Excel sheets.

When it’s time to update a product’s images or change its shipping options or availability, for example, it is a hassle to locate and modify the correct product in the correct file in a timely manner. The same challenge arises when the marketer is trying to execute a new promotion and needs to gather a subset of themed items from different files.

Furthermore, marketers need to make sure they keep these data files clean of errors or problematic formatting, or their nightly imports could fail. There are a lot of moving parts, and the stakes are high to keep everything accurate and updated.

Third-Party Marketplace Challenges

Third-party marketplaces further complicate product data file management, because each requires its own data file, formatted in a specific way.

Below, we’ve included a sample product data file for Wayfair and Amazon, and an example of what the end user sees for the product “Kitchen Aid Mixer.”

If a marketer doesn’t perfectly follow their data spec, the product page will be missing, inaccurate, or incomplete.

Introducing Product Information Management Systems (PIMs)

A Product Information Management (PIM) system centralizes and houses all marketing and technical information for product listings and catalogs in one simple tool.

Marketers can import images, product descriptions, titles, videos, sales sheets, and more into the system for immediate access by team members.

Once in the PIM, products can be searched and filtered, so finding images and assets is no longer a time-consuming struggle. It’s then easily distributed to third-party systems, like websites and marketplaces, supplied to customers, or fed into a digital catalog.

The graphic below is from Whereoware’s PIM system ProductFastLane. We built ProductFastlane with the marketer in mind.

We wanted to make it simple and streamlined to get the data you need to create compelling product pages on your website, run effective campaigns in Google Shopping or Facebook, and get a great ROI out of your third-party market places.

We also aimed to enhance your search engine optimization (SEO). Marketers can write and update compelling product descriptions, titles, and other data points in Product FastLane to optimize each product for natural search.

By housing all product data in one secure location, marketers update product details one time and easily distribute it to the website and third-party marketplaces. This saves time and headache, but also ensures product data is consistent and compelling across the web.

Avoid Product Data Pains

Too many marketers live in spreadsheet hell, battling their product data. Yet, this seemingly tedious task is vital to e-commerce success.

Looking for a lifeboat? A PIM system helps busy marketers manage, update, and optimize product data. Spend less time in the data weeds, and more time developing creative merchandising and outreach campaigns to delight customers.

Get more information on Whereoware’s Product FastLane here or contact us for a demo.

Today’s e-commerce marketers are rockstars. They’re the Swiss Army Knives of sales. The MacGyver’s of marketing. They’re juggling everything – websites, emails, digital catalogs, third-party marketplaces, paid ads, social media, and more, and making it all look effortless.

Under the hood, it’s everything but effortless. Not only are marketers executing campaigns, they’re also working behind the scenes, managing endless data feeds, APIs, automation tools, and CRM systems to power all their digital initiatives.

Clean and reliable data is the foundation of keeping all these balls in the air. Yet, untangling data on a day-to-day basis is one of the trickiest aspects of managing campaigns.

That’s where a Product Information Management (PIM) system helps. Today, we’ll cover PIM system basics and benefits, and four reasons why busy marketers should add a PIM system to their must-have list.

What is a PIM system?

A PIM system is a lifeline to pull you out of spreadsheet hell. You know what I’m talking about – you’ve got all of your product data in an Excel spreadsheet and product images on a USB drive or Dropbox. You’re checking databases for product inventory, hoping your recurring data feeds don’t fail, or importing product data manually.

There are so many moving parts, it’s enough to give the most competent marketer anxiety.

A PIM System replaces all of these moving parts. It places all your product data and assets in one, centralized system. (An example of Whereoware’s PIM system, Product FastLane, is pictured below.) When you’re managing hundreds or thousands of products, the ability to access, search, filter, and update data in one location and then share it across all your digital channels saves time and headaches.

Reduce Data Management Costs

Too often, data is stored in disparate locations and is outdated, or incomplete. When this happens, it takes many man hours to track and check the data – time that is better spent brainstorming or executing the next marketing campaign.

When you have multiple team members handling and relying on the same data, things become hairy fast.

A simple and effective PIM system let’s everyone on your team manage and update standardized data in one place. It streamlines collaboration and reduces organizational costs due to lost productivity.

Improve Data Quality and Reduce Risk Across Marketplaces

Similarly, by maintaining a “master” data standard in your PIM system, you know that everywhere you share your products – whether it’s your website, a digital catalog, or a third-party marketplace – product details are consistent and accurate.

When information changes, you update the system one time, instead of manually updating information on every channel, reducing redundancy and rework.

Many PIM systems, like Whereoware’s PIM system Product FastLane, alert you of incomplete data fields, missing links or images, or other data errors, so you fix them right away. This “second checker” will significantly reduce your anxiety, while ensuring your data is accurate on every channel.

Share Consistent Data Across Marketplaces

A brand’s e-commerce website isn’t the only place retailers or consumers purchase products anymore.

Many brands also sell on third-party marketplaces, like Amazon, Wayfair, Zulily, and more. These marketplaces expose a broader audience to a brand’s products, but each one typically requires a different product dataset, formatted a different way.

These third-party data specs can be built into your PIM system, so all you do is map your data fields to their spec with a few clicks. Since it pulls from one data source, you always have consistent, accurate data across marketplaces.

Increase Traffic and Conversions

Your product descriptions and imagery must grab attention and compel action. A PIM system lays everything out for you, from your product details to important search engine optimization (SEO) fields, like meta descriptions, image titles, and more.

If your SEO data is complete, your site’s placement in SERPs improves, and more searchers find your products.

Free yourself of data headaches: get a PIM system

As more marketers develop data-driven marketing strategies, they need tools and processes to make sure the data they rely on is complete, accurate, and quickly accessible. They can’t spend all day creating, checking, and importing data files.

Clean data is one of the most important weapons in a marketer’s arsenal. Take control of your marketing data with a user-friendly Product Information Management (PIM) system.

Like what you hear? Check out Whereoware’s new PIM system – Product FastLane.