Don’t Fear the Sweeper: Scaling Content for Large Ecommerce Sites

@heymatthobbs

#sweeper14

Matt HobbsSenior User Experience Manager

at National Builder Supply

Content Strategy Applied 2014

Don’t Fear the Sweeper

A thoughtful approach to building a coherent ecommerce catalog…

…that combines product data points, manufacturer-provided content, and original content.

What you’ll hear today

It’s kinda like building a house with a team of experts….

Insanity in. Insanity out.

Manufacturer A

Product Info

Content

Manufacturer B

Product Info

Content

Manufacturer C

Product Info

Content

Product Info

Content

Product Info

Content

Product Info

Content

Manufacturer D

Product InfoContent Product Info

1. What content, data points drive consideration, conversion

2. Translating fragmented incoming data into a pretty result

3. Sweet tools to keep up with changes, errors

4. Layering on original content to fill in gaps and snazz it up a bit

Today’s agenda

Defining product categories for all SKUs

First things first

Clear organization of products for users and spiders alike

Why we care so much about product pages

Our most precious content

Mmm… pie.

Product pages make up more than 85% of our site’s content.

Product pages are your best shot at driving organic search traffic.

Scale your army: programmatically updating 95K pages

http://libertycitys.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/green-army-men.jpg

It’s where most of our users start their journeys

It’s where users make their most important decision: Buy or No

Crucial content that causes consideration, conversion

Welcome to the jungle, we’ve got alliteration

Your most important content: Price, Image, Availability

Spec sheets, marketing copy, bullet points, product specs

And don’t forget product reviews, customer service Q&A’s

Whittling down result sets with faceted navigation

Good question, Morgan.

What do all these content types have in common?

Most of this content is maintained in databases

http://sqlbak.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/SQL.png

Translating manufacturer data into content, navigation

Tactics to ensure content in databases drives clean UX

A bit of history

http://media.komonews.com/images/120630_johann_strauss_jr_660.jpg

Y’all, our old system was pretty rough.

http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/35n1o9

Noisy data leads to sloppy product pages, ugly navigation

http://www.polyvore.com/cgi/img-thing?.out=jpg&size=l&tid=8772030

BronzeClassic BronzeDeep Bronze

Stainless SteelStainless steelStainless_steel

Our new system:

Human Decision Factors (HDFs)

A clearly-defined set of data points and content designed to help users decide if a product is right for them.

Focus on the content that helps users make decisions

Example HDFs for category “Toilets”

Example: Navigable HDFs for category “Toilets”

Define categories and curate clean list of HDFs for each

Insights from Sales and Support

What’s Available from Manufacturers

Competitive Assessment

HDFs

1. Is this HDF navigable or not?

2. Priority of navigable decision factors (order in column)

3. Setting consistent answers, syntax, format

Building out HDFs for a category – more considerations

When you establish clear parameters, everyone’s happy!

Database Developers

Customers Manufacturers

A win we weren’t counting on: Faster load times

!!!

Ongoing optimization of catalog content

Regular sweeps to keep things clean

So how can we keep up?

Our old system: FRUSTRATION

Find errorsNew products

Brief eternityMASSIVE

development queue

New System: CAT MAN

User interface that empowers business users to edit product pages in real time

An “editable version of the product page”

Who uses Cat Man?

Interns

Customer service reps Hot Night sweepers

Outsourced teams

Adding original content to make it awesome

Filling in the gaps

Sometimes you’re given weak, irrelevant, or not-unique content.

Programmatically write unique content to cover ground

6000 Elkay SKUs

TOTO is a huge fan of talking about their G-Max Flushing System, but sometimes they forget:

Find the right mix of manufacturer Kool-aid and plain explanations

Most shoppers have no idea what they’re talking about.

Detailed translations of cloudy manufacturer value props

Helpful info for customers and sales team alike

Sweeten the deal with clever supporting content

If you can validate your hunches with data-driven consumer insights,

you can be confident your content will resonate with your audience.

Hunch + Data = Great Supporting Content

Where our team finds consumer insights

Wrapping up

Almost done here…

Don’t publish all the data you receive; make sure content and data are relevant to customer decisions (insights from sales team, keywords, competitors).

Build sweet tools like Cat Man to streamline manual efforts for updating and editing product content.

What we covered this morning (30,000 feet)

Programmatic writing is a great way to fill in gaps for copy blurbs, bullet points.

Add in cool supporting content to clarify manufacturer Kool-aid or invent other cool uses for products.

What we covered this morning (30,000 feet)

Come with me to Ecommerce Paradise

Thanks y’all!Any questions?

Feel free to connect with me on Twitter:

@HeyMattHobbs