NitroSell eCommerce Early Adopters’ Version Goes Live!

11
Nov/09
1
Posted by nitrosell on November 11, 2009 at 5:20 pm

We are pleased to announce the early adopters‘ version of NitroSell eCommerce has been released as the live, stable version of the webstore!  Thank you to those of you who chose to try it out over the past 10 months, assisting us with cementing the new features and product improvements.

For existing early adopters, this release will take place automatically.

If you wish to upgrade to this version, please open a ticket on the Partner Portal. You can expect to enjoy the following benefits:

Improved Standards Compliance

We strive to meet the standards set out by the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), and to test our software against the most popular browsers and operating systems. NitroSell eCommerce has been tested on:

Mozilla FireFox FireFox
Microsoft Internet Explorer Internet Explorer
Google Chrome Chrome
Opera Opera
Apple Sarafi Safari

During the development of this release, we improved our adherence to accessibility standards, namely, Section 508 compliance, in which the software is now 100% compliant when using “out of the box” templates and themes.

New Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Features

NitroSell eCommerce maximizes your search engine ranking potential by employing safe, well-recognized techniques and technologies. In this release, we have improved the feature-set by enabling  you to customize SEO-related elements of your store, such as title tags, META description and META keywords fields for department, category and content pages.

WebStore Manager (WSM) Enhancements By Section

Management
  • Page Content:
    • Support for custom, non-tabbed content pages;
    • Support for content on brand and theme search pages, as well as subcategory pages;
    • Advanced SEO page properties, such as title tag, META description and META keywords.
Configuration
  • WebStore
    • Product:
      • Store Product Restriction: Allows you to restrict displayed products to only those which are carried by a specified store.
    • Display:
      • Enable Department Grouping: Allows you to group departments, providing additional flexibility when customizing the navigational panel using NitroScript.
    • Shipping:
      • Enable Tax on Shipping: This option allows you to enable tax on shipping, which is not natively supported by RMS.
Shipping & Taxes
  • UPS & FedEX Shipping Integrations:
    • Updated United States shipping services;
    • Added support for Canadian shipping services.

Customers using this release will notice a marked difference in the user interface for the Shipping section, which now includes a suite of Tax on Shipping options.

Payments
Make Changes
  • Edit WebStore Layout:
    • Navigation Panel opened up to customization to those with NitroScript access.

Microsoft RMS / WebStore Integration Improvements

NitroSell eCommerce was designed to leverage the power of Microsoft RMS on your webstore. A new integration feature is Accounts Payments and Insufficient Credit Limit, which enables you to hide the ‘pay on account’ option when a customer has insufficient credit in RMS.

Our Knowledge Base in the Partner Portal contains information on this and many more value-added features that have been included. We hope you enjoy this release and, as always, we welcome your feedback!

SEO: The Advantages of Early Go Live

13
Jul/09
2
Posted by Brian McCarthy on July 13, 2009 at 6:40 pm

Following on from Donogh‘s post on implementation best practices,  here I explain in more depth some of the advantages behind an early go live.

Reasons for delays to a webstore go live can range from small issues with regards to customizations to the look and feel, to inadequate product data. While we emphasize that customers should have an aesthetically appealing site and should optimize the content, small issues that do not effect the functionality, or the look and feel on the whole, should not stop a site from going live.

The following reasons outline why it is better to go live as promptly as possible:

Search Engine Indexing: search engines robots index web sites in phases — in the first phase, only top-level pages are indexed. In the second phase, department pages are indexed, followed by category pages in next phase, etc. These phases can be as much as 4 weeks apart, meaning it can take anywhere from 3-6 months to get your webstore fully indexed. The sooner you go live, the sooner the indexing starts.

Return On Investment: getting a return on your investment is what it all boils down to. If your site remains in staging you will still be paying your monthly fees, but you will not be able to receive web orders.  If you set the store live, you can continue to improve your product data and also accelerate the return on your investment through web orders.

Frequently Updated Site: it’s better to go live now with 100 items with high quality data than with 500 items in 3 months’ time. You can continue to add items to the webstore after go live. This plays to your advantage because search engines favor frequently-updated content, which means their spiders will return more frequently and your webstore will rank higher, sooner.

Obviously, we are not suggesting you set your store live right away, but once the store is at a point where it is ready, i.e., it has a payment gateway, shipping and tax configuration, high quality item data, and the look and feel match the company branding, etc., then why not set it live and starting reaping the rewards!