Hi David,
I have a couple ideas I'd like to toss out there. I think these would be features other users would find useful as well. I'd like to start with this one.
Price Watcher. I've been getting a lot of traffic from Google, in fact most of our traffic comes from there as it turns out, and I am looking for ways to make that return traffic. The vast majority of those users are looking for a specific product, in which a certain percentage click through and then a certain percentage buy. For those that don't click through or buy, my guess is one of the reason's they don't is that they are not happy with the price, so the idea of a "Price Watch" feature came to mind. Basically a user would request to watch a price, provide an email address, confirm that address if it's the first time they set a watch, and then in the background there would be a cron job that would run and look for price drops and email that visitor if one occurs.
Thoughts from David or others?
Cheers, Jon
on the backend side it would be good to have a 'feed review' link for viewing how each feed has been registered with a brief snapshot of recent import info. And more feedback during import would be good, or even an import log that displays after each import. Also, a rollback feature would be great. Thats quite a biggy though.
regards,
Jay
I've copied this over from the "Voucher Codes" thread. Sounds like one other person is interested. I've talked to David a bit about this before, and it would be interesting to hear if other people have any input.
"Sorry if this has been posted elsewhere, but in this new version are there going to be any changes to categorization? As you might be aware we are running multiple installations to allow subcategories, and while it works and we are making money, I'm longing for a better solution that is a little easier to maintain. One of the big problems is I have the same product showing up in different categories, and obviously those don't map together in the product view. Being able to make categories in PT, then map subcategories from feeds to those categories, have all that show up in category pages, URLs, in a breadcrumb, would be a huge improvement. While I totally understand your thinking on the subcategory issue and completely agree with you, I think a better solution could be found."
To expand on this idea a little more. I'll preface this with I think this largely depends on the feed quality you are getting from merchants; mine has been excellent usually offering Department. What I'm envisioning is the ability to manually create your product hierarchy ie master categories -> product categories -> sub categories. From there you map the sub-categories in your feeds (if they exist!) to the ones you manually created, giving you more control and allowing to do this in one PT install. The one obvious downside to this is for very large PT install and very large feeds, it will take a lot of work to map everything. But, as I'm finding, you have to do this anyway as rarely are product categories conserved between feeds.
Like I said I'm running 5 different PT installs to form categories, and while it works, you have to be careful about maintaining your code and the one major pitfall is that a product that shows up in both install won't be mapped together (unless the search code was modified).
Cheers, Jon
$> cd /pub
$> more beer
Hi Jon, I'm with you.
About the idea, there could be a category mapping page that would control all that. The mapping would have to be done per feed (but using our global categories), so the page would have to have links to each feed. And there we would be able to create, edit names and delete multi-level categories and also see all the categories the feed actually has, in an alphabetical order. Showing all our global multi-level categories in an alphabetical order would also be nice, so we could easily visualize which ones to map.
If I understood right, the functionality you are talking about is something like for example if we had a feed with this category field: Nintendo Wii/Games/Adventure we could actually map it into Games/Adventure/Nintendo Wii/, a multi-level category which we created. Also, the possibility to transform different levels of category, for example if we had: Electronics/Graphics Card/PCI Express and map it to Graphics Card/PCI Express.
Also, all these settings would have to be saved, so when importing the next time everything is put in the right place and otherwise warn us if there are new categories so we can map them.
This would be a great feature!!
Regards,
Pedro
I've also been looking in to a category/sub-cats solution. Unfortunetly each merchant seems to have there own way of doing things. Many will use a category or similar field in much the same way but there always seems to be differences between them. I've got some with categorisations so wide open I may as well not use them at all and others that are quite useful.
All things considered its the feed quality that will determine how easy it is to categorise a product and unless every merchant formats there feed in the same way its quite hard to come up with a neat solution. And I've yet to find two feeds alike!
If one feed field were in the format of 'category/sub-cat/sub-cat2' then mapping it would be pretty straight forward. None of mine look like that though :( Some get close but have some bonkers naming convention that doesn't give you a clue as to what the category is. I would be happy with just having a consistant sub-cat field from each merchant. At least then lists can be built on top of that to backfill parent categories.
One idea I've got floating around my head is to have a separate category cleansing script that scans each record and applies a predetermined cat, sub-cat and sub-cat2.
There could be 2 stages, the first scans an imported feeds product and trys to automatically determine the fields by working off a manually created list of keywords to search for in the product name and description. Then the second displays a page where products are grouped accordingly for checking, and alterations can be made manually. Once saved that products categorisation would be flagged as 'cleansed'.
The next time products are cleansed it would only display previously cleansed products if a category conflict is flagged.
The biggest issue.... a crap load of boring manual data entry and testing! its not exactly scalable either. But at least once a product is manually categorised it wouldn't need to be done again! Could work for niche sites if you're willing to put the effort in.... and create the script of course :)
I may just try the keywords scanning and see how it works. Its a shame more merchants don't take there affiliate campaigns more seriously, better feeds would likely lead to higher conversions and more money for everyone!
regards,
Jay
Jay, I understand what you are saying. I've had feeds that are so bad I've actually refused to use them. Most are good though. Let me clarify things a bit. What I'm proposing is registering categories as they are done now, where you choose which field from your feed to use. Many of my feeds have ProductGroup, Category, SubCategory. I usually use subcategory, but it depends on feed. So now you have your merchant feed categories, but they don't show yet. What I'm proposing now is that your category structure in PT is actually made manually, so you would manually make Electronics->Televisions->Plasma or Appliances->DishWashers->HighEfficiency, could probably just be done with an XML file versus some crazy jQuery interface, and then you take all the fields from your merchant field and map them to Plasma or OLED or 3D, and do so for each merchant. Yes a lot of work for large feeds, but you'd only have to do it once (or until merchants make name changes).
Again I'm a huge proponent of this for many reasons, although admittedly this would require a quite a bit of work on David's part to implement this. This gives you the ability to create better URLs and breadcrumbs. I'm reading an SEO book right now and even Google's own whitesheet says that having URLs like domain.com/products/televisions/plasma/panasonictv and a similar breadcrumb are good practices for users and likely SEO. Also, for any of us who have subcategories done by multiple PT installs realize that doing so is a bit of a pain, especially when it comes to having to try and split large feeds.
Maybe this could even be a separate product by David considering the work involved. Have a PT and PT Pro version? I would gladly pay more for a version with more features and finer grained control
Cheers, Jon
$> cd /pub
$> more beer
Although it sounds like a good idea, in practice to have a full category tree in the product url, such as http://www.bonzababies.com/baby/Feeding/Highchairs/Bumbo-Baby-Sitter.html, can be a double edged sword. This is because the merchants seem to change their categorisation a bit too much, and because you're likely to import the same product from a different merchant and it will have different categories etc. I've found that you just end up with a load of indexed pages that no longer exist. So, I'd recommend using a tree structure for breadcrumbs but not in the url. For instance, I've got around to amending this site to do just that which was using a full category path url - http://www.lightingdirect2u.co.uk/lights-lamps/brushed-steel-3-light-led-under-cabinet-downlight-kit.html
Cheers.
Keeop
Hi again,
As a follow up to the great 'categorisation' issue, what I have done where there's one good feed and several bad ones, is to set the good feed to be 'an authority' for brand and category details. What this means is that whenever a product from a dodgy feed is matched to one in the 'authoritative' one, the brand and category information is copied from the good product to the bad product, thus keeping the product information standardised. This is handy if you're working with categorisation as it can bring down the number of categories and also means when searching for 'Philips LCD-200', or whatever, that product is only assigned to one category and one brand.
The only gotcha, really, is you do need unique product names that will not be spanning categories on purpose, but this is quite a good way of cleaning up some bad or missing data. You just need to take a look at the brand mapping or product mapping code and create a new snippet to work this in, as it's a similar principle of storing the good data in an array and matching it on feed import.
Cheers.
Keeop
An option to select different currencies with the new option of folders in the new upcoming 12/10A distribution would be nice. Sort of like the folders /uk/, or /us/, etc. within the same niche, but different currencies. Being able to mix and match folders, currencies, categories can make a site more visible locally and nationally. I know another difficult task would be Web Service API access to addind more networks like LinkShare and Commission Junction. The voucher codes, and logo modifications were awesome.
Great work,
Roy
Hi Jon,
That sounds interesting - a sort of "subscribe" to this page idea. As you may have seen from this thread there is an update to Price Tapestry coming very shortly - I'm making great progress with voucher codes functionality and made some performance improvements under the hood...
Cheers,
David.
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PriceTapestry.com