3cc’s Backyard

When you’re selling things online there always seems to be this “invisible barrier” between the sales volume you have and the sales volumes you would like to achieve. While eBay now offer all sorts of programs to “boost” sales there are often easier & cheaper things you can do to help your sales grow.

One of the most noticable changes was their introduction of the eBay PPC (pay per click) program, where you can advertise in places you normally wouldn’t be seen for a per-click rate (which of course is variable depending on the keywords, competition and placement for the advert). You could also call on traditional ad networks like Google Adwords to get your products out there, or even price comparison websites such as shopping.com - again costing you per-click prices…with no guarantees of conversions.

I found the following article when digging through my bookmarks the other day, and while it is a couple of years old, many of the facts stand true today (SEO is more effective than PPC). What I want to take from it is that a good seo campaign will generally improve sales over time, and will keep driving sales even when you stop paying the bill. PPC is just a switch. As soon as you stop, sales slow.

Anyway - here’s a couple of ideas on how to boost your SEO rankings with your eBay shop:

1. When creating listings, place the title of your item and other descriptive terms in H1 and H2 headers. These titles need to contain relevant keywords to your product, with high keyword density. When looking for keywords you can use the Google Keyword Analyser Tool to show search volumes for different keywords. The tool will also suggest other keywords to try. Try to think about terms people might search for most and put these in bold. Using the H1 and H2 headers essentially gives search engines a ’snapshot’ of what that page might be about, and the bold text will be taken as important; giving it some extra weight in the search engines.
2. Make sure you list products regularly to keep the search engines coming back for indexing. The more active your eBay store seems to the search engines, the higher (and more frequently) it will be listed.

3. Make use of the free eBay tools such as Blogs, Reviews and Guides. You get free accounts with your seller account and you’ll see many of the larger sellers with tags such as “Top 25 Reviewer” etc. They have written lots of reviews or guides, which have then been indexed by the search engines. Every one of these reviews, posts or guides contains several links back to that seller’s shop and products.

4. Use the RSS feeds included in eBay stores. You can automatically set Google to grab your products and essentially promote them for free in search results, comparison shopping and more. This used to be done through the google store connector, but now you have to setup the google base - ebay feed link yourself.

5. Make use of the “Manage My Store” section in My eBay. Under Store Design, click “Search Engine Keywords.” You can use the Google Keyword Tool mentioned earlier to find high traffic keywords - but remember to only use keywords related to your store else you might be punished for keyword stuffing (using too many, or non-related keywords).

Thats all

Not that long ago, Google offered a “Google Base Connector” which basically loaded up your ebay store and transferred all your products to Google Base.

Also not that long ago, eBay started putting its own feed on Google Base - and recently Google stopped supporting the base connector because of this.

There are several problems here.

1. eBay do not include everybody’s products. Just do a search and you’ll find that lots of people have suffered falling sales due to the demise of the google base connector.
2. You no longer have any control about when the feed can be uploaded to base - you’re trusting eBay to include you.
3. You can’t brand your eBay store as your own - on google base your store comes up as “eBay.co.uk” as opposed to your merchant name.

There’s an easy fix for people with eBay stores though. Simply hit “Manage my shop” and go to “Listing Feeds” here. Enable feeds and copy your google base specific feed address (will be “http://esssl.ebay.co.uk/GetListings/yourstorename?fmt=g”).

Now head over to base and register this data feed with the name “yourstorename.htm” (changing your store name for the one in the link). Head to the settings tab up the top and paste the ebay link into the “Website URL (Optional)” box, then hit submit.

Now all you have to do is go back to the data-feed page, and create a schedule with the link you got earlier & a date and time to get the file every day, week or month.

All that’s left now is to sit back and wait!

The key thing here is using “http://esssl.ebay.co.uk/GetListings/yourstorename?fmt=g” for both the website address AND feed address. If you try and use anything else it’ll fail. Also make sure the rest of the settings on your account look ok before you submit your first feed

The other day we had the simple request from a client - they asked us to update every price on their site. They asked us to increase their prices on ALL their products by 8%.

This is a simple bit of SQL which updates all the numbers in a field by a percent.

Let’s say our database is called catalog.

Our table is called products.

Our field is called products_price.

So the query on the catalog database would be:

UPDATE products SET products_price = products_price * 1.08

Simple! ‘UPDATE products’ tells the database which table we’re talking about, and ‘SET products_price’ will alter every value in the table in the ‘products_price’ field.

Then, we say ‘products_price = products_price * 1.08′, which simply says that the each value for products_price will be 1.08 times the current value. As we know, a value * 1.08 is 8% bigger.

But wait! That’s given us some nasty prices - for example,

523.99 * 1.08 = 565.9092

4 decimal places? We could use the ROUND function to round our values to 2 decimal places.

UPDATE products SET products_price = ROUND ( products_price , 2 )

I’ve kept it in the same format as above so you can see how it is used. This will round all values to 2 decimal places. Now, to run both queries at the same time:

UPDATE products SET products_price = ROUND ( products_price * 1.08 , 2 )

Easy! That’s updated all your prices in a couple of seconds. This was run on a site using ZenCart - that’s where the database structure is from, while the query was run in phpMyAdmin.

So, am I missing something, or it a REQUIREMENT to have ALL of your old campaigns sitting in your account, forever?

Imagine how silly this would be, deleting some data, thinking it’s gone - but it’s still there…and sporting a big DELETED.

It’s confirmed that you can’t actually remove campaigns from Adwords, and one of our new staff was most confused.

Why keep the old campaigns? Well, because we all love Historical Data! Or that’s what Google says anyway.

There is an easy solution - you can set your account to ‘pretend’ the data was deleted. It’s in a little box to the top right of the campaign box…they explain it more here.

Thing is, you can easily remove the deleted campaigns from your sight - but you’ve still got their totals messing with your curent totals.

Google, I want a purge feature. Delete = Delete. Delete DOES NOT = Disable.

One of our clients recently had an issue where his Godaddy FTP Backup Server was full - causing his seperate dedicated Plesk Server to fill up it’s own Drive with Temp files, while at the same time use a lot of resources trying to put files to the full FTP backup server.

You can sign up for a remote backup server when you order a godaddy hosting service, and it does sound a good idea considering it should keep your data safe. You can only access the data on the FTP server from within the Godaddy network - stopping any outside access.

When Plesk attempts to connect to a remote FTP server, it first tries to place a file on the server - which is a no-go if the server is full. This fails of course, so you can’t even get a directory listing of the remote server through Plesk.

Easy solution though - connect to your server through SSH and then use commands to connect to the remote FTP through your server.

1. Open your SSH application of choice (we use PuTTY, available free from greenend.org.uk) and connect to your server. Use your main IP address or your hostname (domain name), depending on what your host supports. For dedicated servers from Godaddy, either can be used.
2. Once you’ve logged in with your root username and password, simply enter
   

   FTP XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX (where xxx…. is the IP address of the FTP server) and hit enter.
   then your login username, hit enter and then your login password (also followed by enter). For Godaddy all of this is available in your Server Management Area.

3. Now you should be logged on to the server. Type DIR and hit enter to produce a list of the directory contents. This also shows file sizes and other details.
   1. You can DELETE individual files on the server using the DELETE command. For example, to delete info.php use DELETE info.php and hit enter.
   2. To change directories type CD directoryname/ and hit enter.
   3. To copy a file to your local server type WGET filename.file and hit enter. If you don’t specify a directory then the file will be copied to your server in the /root/ directory. You can access this directory by connecting to your server using PuTTY and typing DIR and hitting enter when you’ve logged in. (It will be in the default directory).

That’s a basic guide, there are many better out there but this follows the basics. There are a couple of useful SSH commands on this site, including how to set specific options.

Plesk incorporates a useful backup utility which allows an easy backup of your server, on a schedule or just when you please (AKA log in and click backup…). You can choose between local backups and remote backups too, allowing you to co-locate your backups for safety.

When the backup process is interrupted there can be huge temporary files left which will soon fill up your server and cause it to cease all processes. You won’t be able to access Plesk or any MySQL, for example. We had this problem recently on a client’s server where his FTP server was full - but the system had continued making backups in the temp folder. These were not moved or removed so it was a matter of days before these 20GB+ backups filled his HDD.

There’s an easy way to solve this problem.

Using a SSH client (such as PuTTY), log into your server with the root account. This will allow you unrestricted access.

You will then need to navigate to the /var/lib/psa/dumps/ directory as this is where the backups are stored by default.

In this directory is a folder for each Client on the Plesk server (these are the numbers) and a temp folder. If you cd to the temp folder you can remove (using the RM command) any old files, and failed backup files. For example, to delete backup.backup from the current directory:

rm backup.backup

If you’re looking to move the backups to a new server, or download them, you can find them in /client_number/domain_number/ as large backup files. You can use the move command to move it to a web accessible location. For example, to move the file backup.backup from the current directory to a top website directory, you would use:

mv backup.backup /var/www/vhosts/3cc.org/httpdocs/backup.backup

I would then be able to access backup.backup from http://www.3cc.org/backup.backup.

These commands were useful quite recently when a server needed reinstalling. We simply downloaded a backup of every site on the server, reinstalled the server, added all the domains back into Plesk and uploaded the files into their former positions. The Plesk backup agent then restored the sites.

Simple & effective.

It’s been years since the first Adwords advertisers first commented on whether Google would ever release a funds transfer option for Adsense –> Adwords balances.

Just think how this would help cash flow in a company’s advertising budget - you could even call it renewable advertising.

Money In (from Adsense) = Money Out (from Adwords), and then of course you could throw an additional budget into the mix to further promote more visits, hence increasing the money made from adsense further - like a chain reaction.

This would greatly help us as a development and marketing company when working with our self managed customers. We set up all the marketing for them but use their accounts…so we’re constantly pushing for payments in and out of Google. Once funds have left the Adsense account it may be weeks (or on the odd occasion months) before the company accountants approve a push of funds back into the associated Adwords account.

There have been plenty of discussions over the years, outlining many of the problems of such a scheme, but we’ll keep hoping.

Another interesting problem is how Google deals with exchange rates when dealing with customer’s funds. I was reminded of this when reading a short article over at MEMWG on Adsense.

Whether this was down to how we configured Adsense or just how Adsense is, the whole system works in USD. I was reminded of Google’s binding to the American currency when the exchange rate for GBP-USD changed from the highs of less than a month ago, to new lows…where the Dollar is once again worth more against the Pound - meaning each USD in advertising revenue means more £GBP. Good stuff.

I then remembered that our Adwords accounts are all in GBP…which at the moment is favourable since we get more £ from our Adsense, and pay less for our Adwords than if our account was in Dollars.

That sounds about right. Point of the story there was that perhaps adoption of a single currency WOULD prove beneficial, else it could lead to people playing the currency markets through Google. Unlikely I know, but one has to take every opportunity one gets.

It would also remove most of the barriers to transferring balances between accounts.