We recommend the "ABC" method of determining which items should be addressed first. This article, covering the method for obtaining your "ABC" list, gives you a good starting point with a SQL query that can generate a list of your most popular items, in terms of sales frequency.

The benefits of focusing on your most popular items are three-fold.

1. Your customers have already told you which items they care most about. These "A" items are the products that your customers have purchased more than any other items in your catalog, so starting on those items allows you to set your focus on the items that your web users will care about most.
2. Augmenting your item data will definitely take some time. Sorting out your "ABC" items gets you over the biggest hurdle, which is really just "Where do I start?"
3. The WebAlliance search engine prefers items that have been augmented. So when your users search for a keyword on your website, items that you've put some time into will tend to float toward the top of the list of search results. Of course, there are many other factors that go into search result rankings, but adding additional data onto items will help influence those rankings.  

Web users respond well to visual cues, and you can provide very powerful visual cues by associating quality, vivid images to your items. WebAlliance provides for several distinct ways of associating images with items, as shown in this article.

You can even choose to associate multiple images with a single item. Doing so gives you the opportunity to show a photo of the item along with a schematic, or even multiple angles of an item.

WebAlliance also provides easy to use options for including item documents (like MSDS pages, instruction manuals, etc.) along with your SKUs. This is a good time to start gathering those files and associating them with your items. Steps to associate those files are found in our manual called "Document Links".

Using the best available method, categorizing your items is a huge step toward creating a great online shopping experience for your customers. 

Available methods include certain ERP systems, Attribute Manager, and the PIM-Enterprise.

"Good" web content pretty easily comes down to one thing:  Is it useful? Whether on a content/marketing page or on an item listing, your site content needs to be informative and engaging to your users. WebAlliance has access to numerous fields of item data that you already deal with in your ERP system (see this article which lists those fields for more information), as well as some additional non-ERP fields (via the WebAlliance PIM, ERP-created User Defined Fields, or other means) to create web-friendly descriptions separate from your existing data, if you'd like to enhance your items further.

Specifically for Item Detail (sometimes called SKU Detail) pages, the "Web Desc" field is a great place to enter web-friendly description information for your items. That field allows for plenty of space for a full, engaging description of the item. It can even accept HTML and Textile formatting if you'd like to style your description using something like a bulleted list or hyperlinks. It's not necessary to augment every single item with a Web Desc value; your item listings can be set to show Web Desc if it has a value, but fall back to, for example, the ERP system's Part Description if no Web Desc is available.

A useful field for SKU listings (which appear in search results and category listings, among other places) is the Web Short Desc. It also can accept HTML and Textile formatting, but it's shorter than Web Desc so you can enter a more concise, browsable, description. When users look through search results and category listings, they tend to scan rather than read the item listings. So a concise, efficient description works really well in those cases.

In both the Web Desc and Web Short Desc fields, you can easily cross-link from one item to another item, or even to a category page. You can find instructions for that in the Item and Category Cross Linking article.

Item Attribute Manager and the PIM-Enterprise give you another way to provide your web users with a useful, convenient path to finding the items they are looking for. It works like this:

1. Build your category tree.
2. Put items in those categories.
3. Decide which attributes, or pieces of item data, would be most useful for a web user browsing for an item in each category.
4. Apply attribute values to items in each category.

By providing that data, you're giving your users a definite path to find their desired items, using bite-sized pieces of data that describe aspects of each item.

Accessory Items, available in some ERP systems, can be useful information on your website. Any configured Accessory Items for a SKU can be displayed in a pop-up box, or they can be displayed directly on the SKU Detail listing. Accessory Items also feed into the AddToCart Popup box.

Substitute Items offer your users additional options should an item they find on your website, whether via an external search (Google, Bing, etc.), an internal search, or category browsing, not fit their needs.

Along with the above information, you can include further enhanced information, like Brand Name info, enforced purchase quantities, and more. For any specific concerns, please contact Aldrich Web Solutions.