View Full Version : Dreaming of shopWindow v2.
I thought it might be nice to have a thread where people can post things they would like to have in ShopWindow if this world was perfect and anything was possible.
AffWin and Digiwin have (inadvertantly) mentioned that they know exactly how to do pretty much anything, but don't seem to know exactly what we want or what is needed.
This could really help future development.
I'll start off:
I had a dream last night and........................
A click through from a product (buy now link) automatically added that product to the users basket on the merchants website.
Confuscius
26-06-07, 13:19
I will try to do one dream per day!
Last night I dreamed that I could find all of the Dolce & Gabbana products with a single search (She who must be obeyed's favourite!) or from my missing Brand analysis structure.
Sleep well everyone, don't have nightmares.
Paul
chartfieldconsultants
26-06-07, 13:55
I had a dream last night in which URL re-writing to make SEO/user-friendly page addresses came built into the standard ShopWindow package.
Simple dream
- Quicker please -
Unless it gets quicker then I think most other things are irrelevent.
I can't even be bothered to wait for the results on my own site. Potential customers certainly won't.
I fear this may not be such a simple dream to fix though.
last night i dreamed there were no promotional texts in product titles, just plain old product names.
Ahhhhhhhhh!
then i woke up and it was the same old merchant created nightmare!!
Hi Guys,
Its official, we will shortly be in development of ShopWindow v.2.
We would really appreciate your thoughts and ideas for some realistic improvements for our new version - your feedback as users is of utmost importance to us.
Here's your chance to have your say! We cant promise all of your ideas will be developed, but rest assured all ideas will be read and seriously considered. We've already seen many fantastic ideas up till now and would love a few more....
Looking forward to your responses.
Adrian
SW Integration & Technical Support
adrian.botelho@digitalwindow.com
www.digitalwindow.com
Confuscius
02-11-07, 11:40
Hi Adrian
I seem to recall that at the original 'Committee' meeting in London there were lots and lots of good ideas that have not been implemented to date. Any chance that Amo or yourself could give an update on what the current state of play on those ideas is? eg mod rewrite? slice and dice? image sizing? merchant descriptions? refine by? etc, etc, etc........
Paul
That would be very useful.
At the moment all the issues I can think of have been raised, but it would be useful to check.
My only other request would be that we don't need a degree in coding to implement the upgrade (client) and it will be reasonably easy to keep the modifications we've already personally put in place (after much blood, sweat and tears), or is that a bit optimistic?
Hi Paul,
Good to hear from you.
Yes the developments from the original lunch that we had back in June were noted and we are reviewing those too.
We have made some excellent developments since then (as im sure you are aware) and we now want to build on them.
You may have other requests that have come to light since June, and we want to try and gain an understanding of those too.
Please share with us and help V2 along :D
Thanks
Amo
Head of ShopWindow
Confuscius
02-11-07, 12:12
Just a couple to start off with then ....
1. Require ALL merchants to produce some standard size banners, say 120x60 and 468x60 to start off with, for use within Shop Window on either a rotational or other basis. The idea being that merchants COULD create specific banner offers / discount code banners for use within Shop window sites. Personally, I would give the banners a STANDARD name accross ALL merchants such that we can pull them in based on merchant number eg sw-m1234-468x60.gif + a similarly built href construct for merchant and affiliate and ad number.
2. Deal with the issue of image resizing! Either permit us to read the images ourselves OR fix them your end to some agreed standard / sizing. See previous threads!
More to follow .....
Paul
Off the top of my head I'd like to see a vouchers/code/offers feed for each merchant. This could contain banners and/or descriptions. An 'offer' object would make the most sense. These could be merchant-wide or merchant-product specific.
Also, not really dev related but I'd really like to see the data standardised: Title Case Names, no abbreviated names, no html, entity encoding etc. etc.
Perhaps some way of not showing 'Out of Stock' items - or is that asking too much?
TrafficProducer
02-11-07, 13:11
More Templates Please + Google AdSence
Ability to add Google AdSence, and other simualar ads' landscape and skysreaper, etc.. :) Right, left top, bottom as the user wishes...
Thanks
chartfieldconsultants
02-11-07, 13:24
My pet hobby horse: the ability to define your own category tree so you only have the product categories you want, with the relationship between them you want. That way you could build a niche site that sells just books, or draws a number of perfumed items from different categories (candles, soaps, etc), or sells otherwise related items that currently appear in different branches of the tree such as kitchenware and white goods. Everything you didn't pick would be excluded completely, but in all other respects the SW functionality (index page search, hot picks, etc) would work exactly as it comes out of the box.
clickref!!! to be able to track the whole process right from the start of the user clickin on our adword/etc campaings to the end of the sale process with the purchase made -through us/shopwindow affiliate link -
clickref!!! to be able to track the whole process right from the start of the user clickin on our adword/etc campaings to the end of the sale process with the purchase made -through us/shopwindow affiliate link -
Click ref is already in there.
Open go.php and have a look for $sClickRef
with this being a php file, you can dynamically serve anything to $sClickRef; dates, times, user stats, etc
with abit of imagination, you could even log the HTTP_REFERRER on landing in a cookie, then use go.php to send the referrer in the clickref.
Therefore showing you where your best customers are coming from allowing you to focus your efforts where the best conversion is
Backwards compatability; the ability for those that have hardcoded lots of modified and different versions of v1 shopwindow to carry on with them without having to change everything would be rather nice.
I had a dream last night in which URL re-writing to make SEO/user-friendly page addresses came built into the standard ShopWindow package.
Although I am new to the forum I have to agree with Andy - to my mind Mod re-write built in is an absolute must SEO & PPC are probably the 2 main ways to drive traffic to any site be it and affiliate site or not - we need to have sites as
SEO friendly as possible
Mel
I'd also like a more flexible search. I get a lot of searches for product/serial numbers like AXM110 for example. The problem is a lot of these product numbers are hyphenated but searching for AXM110 doesn't return results for AX-M110, the most common form of this particular serial number. Equally there are cases where people do use hypens and other special characters when the serial number doesn't.
MOD_REWRITE is needed urgent
new urls should come from the page title .html
I'd also like a more flexible search. I get a lot of searches for product/serial numbers like AXM110 for example. The problem is a lot of these product numbers are hyphenated but searching for AXM110 doesn't return results for AX-M110 .....
Absolutely required.
Hi, not restricted to the new version I would like to see the merchants refrain from adding 'from' or 'by' to the end of the product name as this is inconsistent and makes a mess of any seo work. Also the use of " stops the complete title being shown. It is used in 42" tv or 18" childs bike for example and is driving me mad as it affects the html code. Any character that could cause problems should be replaced with the ASCII number such as
& = &
" = "
etc.
This would be great.
Best regards, Phil.
Confuscius
07-12-07, 18:00
A question for you all that I would love to know your views on!
The background : lots of recent events where we find products out of stock, zero commissions on certain products / ranges, millions of products and lots of duplicate type content - so the question is how to create more variability?
My suggestion, just as products / merchants are tagged for adult content then I would like to see the feed containing the basic percentage commission paid on EVERY product and then in the Shop Window code I want to be able to say that when my site is built do not include anything less that x% in this category or y% overall or 3% on Dixons! You get the idea. This would then let me build a completely different dataset for every site and let the affiliate, for once, find out what goes well togethher and lots of other things as well! :D
Clearly all non percent based items would also need marking.
Paul
The product object already has a property called fCommissionAmount that is described as "Estimated commission amount (currently non-functional)". I assume using an amount rather than a percentage accomodates fixed commission products knowing that the commission percentage can easily be calculated using the price data if needed.
Sounds like that's what you're after but who knows when we're gonna get that kind of data to work with. Still, at least someone's thought about it.