Thursday, 11 February 2010

Launching a New E-Commerce site from Scratch

This week has seen me rollout a newly designed e-commerce website (www.london-projectors.co.uk), aimed at the world of audiovisual equipment - specifically projector hire & sales, replacement lamps and ceiling mounting brackets. The site is targetted at the London geographic area and has around 6000 pages which I will be attempt to drive some traffic to over the coming months. The site uses google checkout and the google checkout cart and is built in php and mysql - mostly by hand over the course of the last week. I intend to investigate google base and the effect that this has on traffic, google sitemaps (submission today), plus every other technique I can find to launch on the world.... watch this blog for regular updates.
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4 comments:

  1. brainstorm15 February 2010 at 23:05

    Update so far: Attempting to post the first batch of items to Google base (which populates Froogle). If it all works out I'll have a php script run from cron to generate the data_feed.txt file which google will then import. Next update soon.

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  2. brainstorm23 February 2010 at 22:08

    Latest update: After repeated attempts to get google base to process my datafeed using its schedule feature, I downloaded the data_feed.txt file and manually uploaded it. It processed successfully. This seems strange as it is exactly the same file... I had tried deleting the data feed completely and starting from scratch but it keep sticking at 14 products (all failed to insert) and mentioned delimiters <|> which weren't present in the file. I did try various settings as far as file formats went. I'll keep posting on this issue. 97 products are soon to be searchable (in the UK)! Let's see what happens next.

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  3. brainstorm3 March 2010 at 20:49

    So far so good. I have successfully listed another 6000+ products on Googlebase and we had a couple of calls today. The traffic is beginning to come via search engine referrals rather than my own testing... fingers crossed!

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  4. brainstorm13 January 2011 at 16:56

    Hmmm. Nearly a whole year on. We have over 7000+ pages on the sitemap and sales seem to be steady at the moment, although not remarkable. As ever, a very high % of traffic comes via google.

    I'll do a full update when we hit that 1 year mark.

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