1. Your name contains a URL entity.  When you put %20 in the URL it represents a space character.  Oops.  If your name doesn’t URL encode to your name, you’re doing something wrong.
2. When someone enters your name in Google, it thinks they’re doing math.  Type 80%20 into Google, and it thinks you’re doing 80 modulo 20.  The result is zero!
3. Nobody knows how to pronounce it so you can’t tell your friends, and when you do they can’t search for it.

1.  STOP YELLING!
It’s easy for us to capitalize your product names and categories for emphasis on the page, but very hard to do the opposite and get the original data back.

2.  Item names should say what they are
If they’re pants, put that in the name.  If they’re wedge sandals, put that in the name.  If it’s a notebook computer, put that in the name.  Especially if there are multiple items in the shot, like a belt displayed with the top and the pants.

3.  Keywords should be descriptive and product-specific
Not a repeat of the item name, not all the words from the long description with delimiters between, not keywords about the store that don’t apply to the product.

4.  The longer the description, the better
People browsing your affiliates’ sites want information, and the more you give them the more will click through and the more will buy.

5.  Categories should be set, and contain the relevant information
If things have gender relevance, include that in the category names.  If you sell different types of items, the category should reflect what type each one is.

6. Brand fields should be filled, and consumer friendly
Customers like to search and browse by brand, and we can’t do this if the field is blank.  Also, customers don’t know your brand with corp or inc or things like that tacked on the end, so fill your feed with the name they know.

7.  Use pricing fields in a standard way
If all of your items have a sale price filled in, it’s probably not a sale and it should probably be in the regular price column.  Save the sale price column for specials.

8.  If an item doesn’t have a working image, leave the image URL blank
404 errors, “image not available” images, store logo images.  If you can’t leave them blank, use the same “noimage.gif” type URL for all the broken ones so we can code around it.

9.  Use identifier columns
UPC when available, ISBN for books, Manufacturer Part Numbers that you’d use to order the item from the manufacturer.  And consistent SKUs for your own store that stay the same over time for the same item.

10.  Talk with your affiliates!

This goes without saying, but just like shoppers are the customers of your products, your affiliates are the customers of your feed.   We may have good ideas, we may have terrible ideas, but either way we may tell you something you haven’t thought of.

We work with a lot of web stores here at StyleFeeder, both in terms of user-added links and also by importing affiliate data feeds.  There are literally thousands of these, of varying quality, and we import a good number of them and load them regularly to keep the product listings up to date.

When dealing with lots of feeds, occasionally something odd happens.  A couple of months back we noticed that our conversions of clicks to sales at a certain retailer had dropped to basically zero, which naturally was a concern.  Looking further into it, all the product links that we had were going to 404 pages all of a sudden.  A quick comparison of the URLs we were using to the ones currently in use on the site revealed a change in link structure for the same items, which were still for sale on the site.   A look back through the affiliate messages from that merchant showed a notice that the ecommerce software would be changing but that the links in the affiliate interface would be updated to work.  Looking back, that probably meant the simple banner/text ads that they provide and not the data feed links.

The point

Changing ecommerce software to get new features or performance is a fine thing.  It’s always good to make a site run better and offer a better customer experience.  Having said this, unless you have tremendous brand recognition and customer loyalty there are few things you can do to harm your web site more than introducing an upgrade that breaks all of your inbound links.

• Assuming your home page is still your homepage, those are the only links that will still work in the eyes of search engines, so you’ll lose all SEO benefits to your deep-linked pages.
• In the modern web world of user generated content, and URL shorteners, you’ve likely just broken the bulk of product links on your site that users have added to sites such as StyleFeeder, Facebook, or TinyURL
• Probably minor compared to the other two, Affiliates who have loaded your product feed and do refreshes based on product content changes (or don’t do refreshes) will be tripped up since your changes will hide behind an affiliate URL and possibly not be noticed as changes.

How to Avoid This

If this is something that absolutely has to be done, take an inventory of your inbound links and your affiliates.  Then notify them early and often that  a change is coming.  It’s likely that they’ll react as if you’re announcing a jump off the local bridge, but through the wonder of email you don’t have to watch or listen to this.

Preferably, something like mod_rewrite in Apache could be used to remap the old URL structure to the new one.  Or, if the product identifiers in the URL change then some other sort of page or script or program could be written to map the existing IDs to the new URLs.