My Secret Sauce Recipe For A Successful PrestaShop Shopping Cart

In 2001, Bill Gates – Chairman of Microsoft Corporation wrote that, “… content is king“. Let me give you an example that will make sense to you. You buy a computer chair from Walmart, Inc. Which, I really did this week. The inserted assembly manual had very cryptic diagrams with arrows telling me to: attach bolt to assembly 3-A. Single one liners just like that! I think we have all groaned that assembly instructions should be descriptive; written out in fine detail. And, easy to understand to a non-assembly factory worker!

THAT is exactly how your shopping cart content should be laid out.

Category Names

In an article I wrote in March of 2014 entitled, “E-Commerce Site Structure For Semantic Search“, I wrote that building your e-commerce site structure should take deliberate thought and research. Relating Concepts to Entities improves search algorithms ability to provide answers to query intent. i.e., “Category => Apparel => Sub-Category => Women => Shoes. Tags => brand name 1, brand name 2”

Categories are concepts in this case while tags became the entity relationship. Inserting products into the shoe category inherit all the traits associated from your PrestaShop Breadcrumb Schema. There are several options available in side navigation to filter results by brand, and a feature such as gender = women. Those new associations are indexable on the web and build stronger link associations to query intent.

Product Names

All too often, I observe store owners giving product names that are obscure and rarely identified in semantic search. No one knows about a bitzy-blue trailblazer. In reality, the product item was a children’s red wagon. Which of two would you go search shopping for a toddler’s next birthday? PrestaShop will enable you to identify brand name with brand logo if your theme developer has enabled this in your product detail pages. Search recognizes these insertions with a bit of help from special code. Have that wagon in different colors? Just entitle it a “Childrens Wagon” and let attribute and combinations take care of the rest. Your priority is to match query intent as Mr. Kutcher explains in his article.

Product Content

We really like morphing the default bootstrap theme. It already has schema product markup that will provide you with rich snippet results such as this one:

PrestaShop Rich Snippet Results

This snippet comes from a recent customer with NO content optimization at all. They ranked for the #1 results. But… wait… Who will most often be appending the word, “Bethlehem” into their search query? According to biblical history, Jesus was given this crown of thorns in Jerusalem. Mostly common knowledge in all faiths who cite this event in history. So, understanding query intent may not have matched, well had I not have appended specific locations. Just a search for “Crown of Thorns” doesn’t even get them in the top 10 pages. Schema enhanced the ‘capture’ by displaying reviews, price and stock status over and beyond other listings. Do you notice the taxonomy breadcrumbs? Whom ever wrote amazon’s listing should remind them that a this item is not classified as a collectible figurine when you employ prototype psychology.

Be brief and concise in the short description. You have one paragraph to capture the click-through-lead. The short description is the schema product description. The remaining long content should be icing on the cake. Provide consumer education and refresh me once more on the historical event. Tell me how you made it and the care and reverency in the process and I just might buy from you instead of Amazon.

Encourage product reviews. The more you have the better you convince and the more you WILL convert to a sale. And, we can most definitely assist you with video content creation. How neat would it be for this store owner to actually go out in Bethlehem where these types of thorny bushes grow and talk about the whole biblical account of this crucification of Jesus Christ? Make sure to add the http/https URL of the product page in the video description and in YouTube’s new mobile cards for link back content!

Social Selling

Sometime in June, we’ll invite a few social media mentors to talk about social selling. It will be about forming a conversation and avoiding mindless link share spam. People aren’t on social media to see your adverts. They are there to talk to other people and brands. Make use of that.

My Wrap Up

I’m looking forward to talking with these two experts and what insights they may bring to us and to you! I hope you will join the show and collaborate in real-time. Visit the event page listed at the top to ask your questions or provide additional input that you feel would also be valuable.