SearchFit v8.13 is released and includes a variety of powerful features. Feature highlights include a new Rebate Center, nineteen new marketing feeds as well as numerous enhancements related to SEO, image displays and reporting. To see a full list of new items and changes, please visit the SearchFit v8.13 release notes. Thank you SearchFit users for suggesting some of the features within this release. If you have questions about how SearchFit Ecommerce Shopping Cart v8.13 can benefit your website, please contact us. We are happy to explain the new features and answer any questions you may have about SearchFit. Many new and exciting ecommerce features are on the way, so stay tuned for updates.

SEO Enhancements

Enhancements to SearchFit’s automatic system of 301 redirects may have already improved the SEO on your website. The printer friendly versions of your product pages now include a canonical link to the actual product page. This helps search engines rank your detailed product pages instead of the printer friendly versions. Another enhancement involves how SearchFit handles deleted products. With SearchFit v8.13, a 301 redirect is automatically created from the url of the deleted product to its parent category. This ensures that visitors who attempt to view a deleted product will arrive at a relevant page. You can also take advantage of enhancements made to SearchFit’s “Static Search Pages” feature, which allows you to add a customized list of searches to your website. For example, if you would like to add a list of links to your home page with the title, “Most Popular Searches”, you could use the “Static Search Pages” to accomplish this. The enhancements made to Static Search pages include the ability to add custom Titles, Meta Keywords, Meta Descriptions as well as content above and below the list of search results.

Improved Shopping Features

We are proud to announce the addition of the SearchFit Rebate Center, which allows you to offer valuable rebates to your customers. Specifically, you can now add a “View Rebates” link to each of your products. Rebate information can be presented as instructions or downloadable forms. Additionally, your visitors can visit the brand new "Rebate Center". The Rebate center allows visitors to explore all available rebates by browsing according to category or manufacturer. The rebate information is dynamic, which helps you keep your rebate information current.

The SearchFit Customer Review System has been enhanced to allow you to place reviews directly on your detailed product template. In the past, visitors could only read reviews by clicking a link. Now you can add a set number of reviews to your detailed product pages and display them in an easy to read format. Reviews are added to your page dynamically, which helps ensure that the most up to date reviews are available to your visitors. Reviews also include a link to “Read All Reviews” for the given product.

Your customers will now have an easier time selecting required options. In the previous version of SearchFit if a customer did not select a required option, then an alert would appear asking them to "select all required options". Now, the alert is more specific and states the name(s) of the missed, required options. For example, if the customer did not select a required option, such as "size", the system will specifically state that they should choose a size in order to proceed.

Marketing Feed Enhancements

Your multi-channel marketing capabilities have just increased. A whopping 19 new product feeds have been added to SearchFit’s available marketing feeds. This means that there are 19 new (and 30 total) comparison shopping engines that you can automatically send your product feed to at a specified interval. Once you have setup an account with a comparison shopping engine, a SearchFit marketing feed can be setup in only a few minutes. Feeds can be quickly customized by creating rule sets that determine the product names, descriptions and taxonomy that are delivered to the comparison shopping engines.

Newly Added Marketing Feeds Include:

• www.PriceForSure.com
• www.StreetPrices.com
• www.GrabCart.com
• www.GoShopping.com
• www.NewEggMall.com

• www.ShopToIt.ca
• www.Leguide.com
• www.Pangora.com
• www.ShopMania.com
• www.Smarter.com

• www.SortPrice.com
• www.Shopper.cnet.com
• www.Gifts.com
• www.ClassifiedFlyerAds.com
• www.Oodle.com

• www.MyShopping.com.au
• www.GetPrice.com.au
• www.Ciao.co.uk
• www.PriceScan.com

Aside from having more available feeds, you can also enjoy some enhancements to the marketing feed system. You now have the ability to specify what products should be included in each feed. This means, for example, that you may send one combination of products to Google Base and another combination of products to Bing Shopping. You now have greater control over what happens when your products do not pass the feed validation process. Each feed has its own requirements regarding what data is required per product. Before SearchFit delivers your feed to a particular comparison shopping engine, it checks each product to see if the required fields are populated. A new setting is available in SearchFit where you may specify that: The feed should be delivered to the comparison shopping engine if validation fails, just don’t include the products with missing, required data.

New Ecommerce Web Development Features

Automatically resize your images with a greater degree of control. The Automatic Image Resizing feature allows you to upload one, high resolution image per product and let the system automatically create all the different image sizes needed throughout your site. “Max Width” and “Max Height” settings are now available to give you greater control over how your images are sized and cropped. In addition to your regular product images, SearchFit also allows you to display “Extra” (or alternate) product images. The same automatic resizing capabilities are available for Extra Images. A variety of built in image galleries are available and can be added to your detailed product pages, thus providing an easy, built-in way for you to display your regular and Extra product images. JavaScript programmers will benefit from a new enhancement to the SearchFit “Extra Images” Web Service. In addition to the URL’s of all your Extra Images web service now also lists the dimensions per image. If you are building your own custom image display, this feature should come in handy.

If you would like to automatically add an intelligent product group, such as “Best Sellers” or “On Sale” to the top of each of your categories, then you are in luck. SearchFit v8.13 offers a new “target scope” parameter that can be specified per Product Group. This allows SearchFit to automatically display an intelligent product group, such as your “Best Sellers” in a way that only products from the currently viewed Category (or Manufacturer) are displayed in the group.

New Ecommerce Reporting & Data Management Features

The Member Rewards feature allows you to give qualifying customers store credit for use on a future purchase. This encourages customers to meet the minimum order amount needed to receive store credit as well as encouraging repeat business. To help you better analyze earned rewards and communicate that information to your members, you can now export rewards information per member. For example, for a given member, you can export their total number of orders, total amount of orders, date of last order, earned rewards and available rewards. You may use this data to analyze your rewards program. You may also pass this information on to your members in order to encourage them to make another purchase. For example, you could email your members the message “Visit mystore.com in order to use the $20 store credit you earned through our rewards program”.

New charts for Top Selling Manufacturers by Quantity, Revenue and Profit have been added that allow you to analyze your top performing manufacturers/brands.

The new “Top Selling Manufacturers by Profit” report shows a pie chart of your Top 10 Manufacturers. Hovering over slices allows you to view more information. Clicking a slice allows you to drill down to a pie chart showing top selling products by manufacturer.

If you have questions about how SearchFit Ecommerce Shopping Cart v8.13 can benefit your website, please contact us. We are happy to explain the new features and answer any questions you may have about SearchFit.

This week SearchFit v8.12 was released. Highlights from this version include new report types, product feeds and a variety of miscellaneous new features and enhancements. This article will not mention every item from the newest release. To see a complete list of items, view the v8.12 release notes: http://forums.searchfit.com/viewtopic.php?t=3769

New Ecommerce Sales and Profit Reports

SearchFit sales reports have been enhanced to show more data regarding profit. New metrics include profits by hour, day, month and year. In SearchFit terms, "profit" refers to the difference between cost price and selling price. The ability to view profit allows you to more easily understand the real value of goods sold. Additionally, you can view sales and profit charts for Manufacturers, Category Types, Categories and Products directly from their corresponding screens. For example, you can now view the sales and profit reports for a particular category by visiting the "Categories" screen, then clicking the "More" link corresponding to an individual Category. A menu will appear where you may choose to view sales or profit reports. Another report type new to SearchFit v8.12 are Overall and Monthly Loyalty Rewards and Monthly Used Coupons. The Loyalty Rewards report shows the amount of Rewards dollars used by your customers. As you would expect, the "Monthly Used Coupons" report shows the value of coupons used by your customers.

New Product Feeds for Comparison Shopping Engines

Take advantage of additional marketing channels with two new Marketing feeds: Pronto.com and Become.com. SearchFit provides an automated system of creating and delivering product feeds to these comparison shopping engines (and many others). The Pronto Network spans a growing network of shopping verticals, including ProntoStyle.com, ProntoHome.com and ProntoTech.com that provide easy to use comparison shopping tools for discerning consumers seeking the right products from the best merchants at the lowest prices. Become.com is working to provide comprehensive, relevant, and unbiased research information to help you choose the right product. Become.com also provides a comparison shopping service to help you get the best deal.

More Helpful New Ecommerce Features and Enhancements

• Coupon Enhancement: Ability to assign a Seller to a Coupon. If buyers use the coupon and place orders then the orders will be assigned to the Seller. Sellers are able to login to the admin pages and review the orders that are placed using their coupons. Sellers are also able to review sales and commission reports for their orders. Store owners should be creating Sellers as Service Users, whose permission is to have read only access to the orders and full access to all reports.
• SearchFit Includes Enhancement: New dynamic include implemented that fetches the content of the specified common include and uses appropriate rendering engine when the “type” argument is provided.
• SearchFit Includes Enhancements: Ability to use the new “staticContent” parameter for DYNAMIC_INCLUDES to allow static content to be included on the generated page that will be replaced at run-time by the dynamic include content using AJAX
• Improved Testing Capability: Ability to test Order Export Template at Design/TemplateStorage/ExportOrders
• More Flexible Filters: Ability to override filters for product links
• More Customizable Category Displays : Ability to override category templates for subCategories

Google Analytics sets the standard for website analytics applications. This powerful and free tool tells volumes about your website visitors, traffic sources, content and ecommerce transactions. Recently, the "Intelligence" feature was added, which alerts you when abnormal changes to your site metric’s are occurring. By modifying your site in ways that you "think" will increase your conversion rate, then monitoring the results in Google Analytics, you can begin a cycle of continuous improvement on your website that maximizes your revenue per visitor. Even with its advanced features, Google Analytics is still relatively easy to install. By simply copying and pasting code provided by Google onto your website template, you are well on your way to a successful installation. The part of the setup and maintenance process that increases your development time is adding the Google Analytics tracking code to each page of your site. The time to do this increases if you wish to implement Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking and Funnel Goals. SearchFit’s Automated Google Analytics Installation feature solves these two issues.

Automated Google Analytics Installation Tools

SearchFit allows you to add Google Analytics tracking code to your website in record time by using its Google Analytics Setup screen (pictured below). You may enable tracking code by simply checking the "enable" checkbox and entering your Google Analytics tracking id into the "tracking code" field. Additionally, you may enable Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking by checking the "ecommerce" checkbox on the SearchFit Google Analytics Setup screen. Google Analytics Ecommerce tracking allows you to view information related to the transactions on your website and cross reference this data with other metrics, such as traffic source. By checking the "funnel" checkbox on the SearchFit Google Analytics Setup screen, you will add the necessary code to create a funnel goal for each step of your checkout process.The funnel goal will allow you to better analyze your cart abandonment by seeing the abandonments per checkout step and where visitors went after abandoning. Each of these three items requires a different code snippet to be placed on your website. SearchFit handles this for you automatically. All that’s left for you to do is configure your Google Analytics Administration Area.

Configuring Your Google Analytics Administration Area to Work With SearchFit

There is nothing special that needs to be done to get Google Analytics up and running with your SearchFit-Powered website. You do have to take the normal steps to set everything up. Google has an easy to use interface and quick setup process, so this is usually a fast, painless process. Here are the general steps you may follow:

1. Create a Google Analytics Account. See this page for information: google.com/analytics
2. Enable Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking: See this page for information: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55528
3. Create a Funnel Goal: See this page for more information: http://www.searchfit.us.com/help/index.htm#faq-500-how_to_configure_google_analytics_cp.html

Please let us know if you would like assistance setting up your automated Google Analytics installation, or have any other questions regarding the SearchFit Ecommerce Platform.

Connect with your user base by offering on demand updates about your site’s inventory. Your RSS feed allows customers to cut straight to the point and view an up to the minute list of your latest product offerings and specials. Maintaining an RSS feed is one way to help encourage customers to develop a continued relationship with your store by offering better service. The SearchFit RSS feed feature was designed to allow you to build multiple RSS feeds for your store. Offer your customers RSS feeds for product selections, such as “On Sale”, “Best Sellers” and individual feeds per category. Your customers can then use their favorite RSS reader to save and view your RSS feeds’ updates. This increases the connection between you and your customers and gives them the information they need in order to make frequent purchases.

RSS Feeds For Ecommerce 101

RSS stands for “really simple syndication”. An RSS feed is a list of information in a particular XML format. Each RSS feed you make has an associated URL, such as this RSS feed URL. The RSS feed can be more easily viewed and managed by viewing it in an RSS reader, such as Google.com/reader. By the way, an added benefit of using an RSS reader is the ability to save many different RSS feed urls. Once your RSS feed URL is entered into your RSS reader, you can view the items listed on the feed and also view a notification when the feed is updated. For example, if you were to add the Power Search RSS feed to your RSS feed reader, you would be able to view that feed in a more legible fashion and read updates whenever a new product is added to that site’s inventory. For advanced users, RSS feeds can also be used to syndicate content.

SearchFit RSS Feeds

SearchFit allows you to create an unlimited number of RSS feeds. If your goal is to have an RSS feed for each category in your store, plus RSS feeds for sale items, new items, best selling items, etc, SearchFit allows you to do this. The good news is that once you create most of these feed types, they will update automatically as you make changes to your product data. The SearchFit RSS feed feature works using SearchFit Product Groups. A product group is a collection of products that you specify. You can either hand pick each product that should appear in a product group, or set rules to let the system know what products should be included in a given group. Read our past article about custom ecommerce product displays for more information about SearchFit Product Groups. In terms of template development, a “SearchFit Keyword” can be added to the bottom of your website template to automatically list the links your RSS feeds. This makes it convenient for users to find your links and easy to manage updates to your template.

Automated RSS Feed Types Available in the SearchFit Ecommerce Platform

People who view RSS feeds want frequently updated content, and that is exactly what you can give them with an automated RSS feed system. Create an unlimited amount of RSS feeds and set them according to the available intelligent product types listed below. Additional settings are available to built RSS feeds for a particular category, time period, product amount, etc.

• Best Selling Products By Quantity
• Best Selling Products By Revenue
• Best Selling Products By Profit (sale price – cost price)
• Most Recent Products
• Top Ranked Products (best customer rating)
• Most Ranked Products
• Most Profitable Products
• Products on Sale

Please let us know if you would like assistance creating your RSS feeds or have any other questions regarding SearchFit ecommerce platform.

If you are running an ecommerce store which sells apparel, or any type of product that is very customizable, then consider using dependent product options. Your customers will be able to choose only the combination of options which you would like to present. Dependent options also gives customers the ability to purchase a highly customized product. Each available combination of dependent product options can use SearchFit’s inventory control system. This powerful capability allows you to prevent ordering option combinations that are out of stock.

Offer an Improved Shopping Experience and Streamline Your Order Management Process with Dependent Options

Dependent Product Options are one of the recent feature enhancements available in the SearchFit ecommerce shopping cart. A product with Dependent Options works in the following way: After the user selects the first option, the next set of options appear dynamically and include relevant choices only. In SearchFit terms, the second set of options is "dependent" upon the first, and a set of options (ex = "color") is known as an "option group". For example, the user may select a "color" from the first option group, then the second "size" option group will appear. The available choices will include only the "sizes" available for the selected color. Dependent Options can be used with many option groups, allowing the user to perform an action like selecting size, then color, then material, then graphic, then button type, etc. Customers love the ability to customize products and giving them the ability to do so with Dependent Options can create a more exciting shopping experience with a higher conversion rate. View an example a simple example Dependent Product Option display.

The above shows the option group “size” being dependent upon “color”. The only available sizes for “white” are S, XL and 3X.

From an order management perspective, Dependent Options offer the ability to track inventory per option combination. If you sell "Your Best " t-shirt in blue and extra large, then the system can track that combination of options and adjust your inventory accordingly. In clothing stores, or other shops where option combinations affect the product SKU, the ability to track SKU’s per option is an extremely helpful feature.

Existing SearchFit users can read setup instructions for Dependent Options with inventory control in this forum post. Please let us know if you have any questions about SearchFit’s Dependent Product Option feature or how the SearchFit Ecommerce Platform can help improve your online presence.

Please let us know today if you would like assistance building your Product Groups or have any other questions regarding SearchFit ecommerce features.

SearchFit “Product Groups” are sets of products that you define within the SearchFit control panel. Product Groups allow you to classify your products separately from your product catalog structure. You can benefit from Product Groups by showing highly customizable product displays anywhere throughout your website. Pages such as your home page, articles and upper level category pages which do not normally show products can instead show a Product Group. This gives the customer the ability to view and purchase products outside of your normal catalog structure. Maximize your screen real estate and conversion rate by using Product Groups to place products exactly where your customers want to find them. For example, on your home page, you can add a Product Group that automatically shows the best selling items. On your upper level Category Pages you can add a Product Group that automatically shows your most recent items specific to that Category. Other highlights of Product Groups include the ability to define discounts and special indicators per Product Group. Read on to find out more!

Standard Product Group Displays

You can place a product display in key areas throughout your website that are outside your normal product catalog structure using Standard Product Groups. “Standard” Product Groups are frequently added to home pages, articles, FAQ pages, etc. Once you determine the products that your customers are most in need of when they are on a particular page of your site, you can add a Standard Product Group display which shows those products. For example, on your FAQ page, you could display a product beneath each FAQ that relates to the FAQ subject matter. On your home page, you could add several Product Groups which target your different market segments. Each Product Group layout is customizable allowing you to show different image sizes, buttons and information for each Product Group.

Intelligent Product Group Displays

Automatically add a product display to your site which contains only products that match a set criteria. For example, add a product display to your home page that automatically lists your best selling products. SearchFit includes the following Intelligent Product Group types:

• Best Selling Products By Quantity
• Best Selling Products By Revenue
• Best Selling Products By Profit (sale price – cost price)
• Most Recent Products
• Top Ranked Products (best customer rating)
• Most Ranked Products
• Most Profitable Products
• Products on Sale

Intelligent Product Groups are fast and easy to create. Aside from the above group types, further settings are available to refine the products which appear in the group, such as:

• [consider products] In the last X days
• Parent Category Type
• Parent Category
• Max Products in Group

This gives you the ability to create a highly specific Product Group such as: Show all best selling products by quantity from Category X in the last 30 days.

“Dynamic” Product Group Displays

Dynamic Product Groups can be placed only on “Custom Pages” and “Product” templates. Standard or Intelligent logic can be used to select the products for a Dynamic Product Group. The differences between Dynamic Product Groups and Standard include:

• Dynamic Groups are added to the page dynamically after page load.
• Has ability to automatically show products from the parent category when used on detailed product pages
• Example Usage of Dynamic Product Groups on Detailed Product Page. The below code snippet will add a product display from Product Group with whose ID is 3. Assuming that the Product Group whose id is three is also an intelligent Product Group, the “Parent Category” setting will be automatically set to the parent category using the keyword: AUTO_GENERATED_PRODUCT_CATEGORY_ID
  • DYNAMIC_INCLUDE(PRODUCTS_GROUP, productGroupId=3, categoryId=AUTO_GENERATED_PRODUCT_CATEGORY_ID)

Promotional Product Group Displays

A “Promotional Product Group Display” is a product display which appears in a panel during step one of checkout. Use this Product Group Display to give your customers one last chance to add additional items to their order. Promotional Product Group Displays can help increase your average order value. You may specify the Product Group to use in your Promotional Product Group display on the “Products” tab | “Configure Products” screen | “Promotions” tab.

Discounts by Product Group

Product Groups are not only for product displays, they can be used for other purposes like assigning discounts to products. If you would like to assign a particular discount to products from several categories, then you can create a discount per Product Group. This allows you greater flexibility than creating a discount per product or Category.

Use Product Groups to Add Special Indicators

Identify products that meet a certain criteria by creating an Intelligent Product Group. Then, modify your product template to add a special graphic only if the product is in the specified Product Group. For example, you can use this technique to add a special icon to your product template for best sellers only.

This feature works using a new SearchFit Dynamic Include: PRODUCT_IF_IN_GROUP. The feature works in accompaniment with SearchFit’s Intelligent Product Group system. Example Usage:

DYNAMIC_INCLUDE(PRODUCT_IF_IN_GROUP, productGroupId=XX, inGroupHTML=<img src="images_templ/on-sale-icon-sm.gif">, notInGroupHTML=)

• Replace “XX” with the ID of Product Group.
• Replace the inGrouHTML value with the value that should appear if the product is in the Product Group
• Replace the notinGrouHTML value with the value that should appear if the product is NOT in the Product Group

Display a Product Group on Your FaceBook Page

Add a Product Group to your FaceBook Page. Let your fans view a display of your products without having to leave FaceBook! When FaceBook users who are not yet fans of your page arrive, they will view your Product Group. Your FaceBook Page fans will be able to view the group by clicking a tab. Similar functionality is also available for networking platforms which are compatible with Open Social, such as MySpace.com. SearchFit’s “Social Networking Apps” screen allows you to create social networking applications whose functionality is to add a SearchFit product group to the corresponding social networking platform. Learn more about SearchFit’s social networking tools.

Please let us know today if you would like assistance building your Product Groups or any other questions regarding SearchFit Ecommerce Platform Features.

We are happy to announce the release of SearchFit v8.11. This release gives you some useful features that can benefit the look, usability and load times of your website. Feature highlights include the ability to add special indicators to your product displays, Power Search auto complete search form and the ability to parallelize downloads. In this article, we are showing some of the highlights of the SearchFit Ecommerce Platform v8.11 new features. For a full list of v8.11 new features and changes, please see the SearchFit v8.11 release notes. To learn more about searchfit features, visit our ecommerce shopping cart features section.

Automatically Add Visual Indicators to Your Products such as New, Sale & Best Seller

Help your customers browse your category pages more easily. You now have the ability to change the design of your product listings on your Category pages to show their special statuses like “new”, “on sale”, “best seller” etc. For example, you may place a small “New!” icon next to each product name for new products. Or, you may use JavaScript to completely change the graphics & color of each new product. The system offers the ability to use a highly customizable design.

This feature works using a new SearchFit Dynamic Include: PRODUCT_IF_IN_GROUP. The feature works in accompaniment with SearchFit’s Intelligent Product Group system. First, create an intelligent product group. For example, if you would like to show a “New!” icon, you would create an intelligent product group of type “Most Recent Products”. Then, add the new PRODUCT_IF_IN_GROUP keyword to your product template. The id of the “Most Recent Product” groups should then be specified as a parameter in the dynamic keyword.

Example Usage:

DYNAMIC_INCLUDE(PRODUCT_IF_IN_GROUP, productGroupId=XX, inGroupHTML=<img src="images_templ/on-sale-icon-sm.gif">, notInGroupHTML=)

• Replace “XX” with the ID of Product Group.
• Replace the inGrouHTML value with the value that should appear if the product is in the product group
• Replace the notinGrouHTML value with the value that should appear if the product is NOT in the product group

Power Search Auto Complete Integration

Offer your visitors an auto complete dropdown when they use your Power Search form. This is a special user interface element for SearchFit customers who are also taking advantage of Power Search, our advanced site search tool. Read more about SearchFit Power Search. Auto Complete is a dropdown which appears after the user begins to type in the search field. As the user types, the drop down automatically shows product-related search terms. The user can click on the search term to perform a search. Auto complete makes searching easier. Customers are more likely to find what they are looking for and make purchase from your website.

Automatically Export Your Product Feed to TheFind.com

According to The TheFind.com “[TheFind] is the vertical search engine for shopping that puts every product, every store, every sale, coupon and discount, right at your fingertips. No matter what it is you.re looking for, you can quickly find the lowest price, the best deal, the perfect gift, or that hard-to-find item. TheFind crawls the entire Web and with it’s patented search technology helps shoppers discover everything that online shopping, local shopping, and green shopping have to offer. Over 320 million products from more than 500,000 stores and online merchants are currently universally accessible through TheFind.com, TheFind Mobile, and TheFind iPhone App.“

You can find the new marketing feed for TheFind.com in the SearchFit control panel | “Marketing” tab |”Marketing Feeds” panel.

Reduce Page Load Times with Parallel Downloads

High traffic sites can benefit from shorter load times by Parallelizing Downloads across domains. This works by allowing the browser to download more items simultaneously. SearchFit now allows you to specify alternate domains to source different elements generated by the system, such as product images, CSS and JavaScript.

SearchFit v8.11 contains more new features and changes than listed here. See the release notes for more information. Please contact us today if you have questions about SearchFit or would like assistance implementing these new features on your website.

A mega dropdown navigation menu is a type of dropdown menu with large, structured sections. Mega menus are not multi-level. The user is not presented with additional levels of dropdowns when hovering over items in the mega menu dropdown sections. For example, a multi-level dropdown menu may show additional dropdowns as the second level links are moused over. A mega menu dropdown will not show additional levels. Mega Menu dropdown content is shown within one big panel and typically uses a multi-column layout including a clear hierarchy, section dividers and additional graphics like icons, illustrations, banners, etc. Please let us know if we you have questions about how SearchFit’s website menu features can benefit your website.

Example of a Mega Menu Powered by SearchFit

Cooler-Store.com has a mega menu which is automatically generated using the SearchFit Website Menu Template. The top-level links are Category Types and the the dropdowns contain Categories and Sub Categories. Links within the dropdowns are automatically divided into columns. Category and Sub Category links are styled differently to provide a clear hierarchy. The dropdowns themselves are positioned in such a way that they never go outside the horizontal bounds of the website template.

Benefits of Mega Menus

Compared to the commonly used “multi-level ” type of dropdown menu, mega menus offer several advantages, the main one being improved usability. Users can see the entire dropdown at once in one big panel. The tedious hovering to reveal sub menus as experienced in multi-level dropdown menus is no longer necessary. The large space available for the mega menu dropdowns allows the additional of icons, graphic dividers and prominent headings. Combined with an understandable grouping of links, these items greatly enhance the users ability to quickly skim and understand the dropdown content.

“People have enough on their minds, and messing with short-term memory reduces their ability to accomplish their tasks on your site. Mega drop-downs show everything at a glance, so users can see rather than try to remember.” Jacob Nielsen

When done right, adding graphics to your mega menu dropdowns can make your website design more attractive, increase conversion rate and draw attention to your brand identity. Mega menus provide additional real estate for items like banners and illustrations. Including a banner advertisements inside your mega menu dropdown can help funnel your visitors to your most important pages, such as sales, new products, etc. Aside from banner advertisements, you can include additional graphics inside your mega dropdowns. For example, you may include graphics related to your brand identity or illustrations that symbolize the content of the parent dropdown. More complex types of content such as forms can be added to your dropdowns but should be done sparingly so that your menu and website retain good usability.

The SearchFit Website Menu Template Now Allows You to Build Mega Menus

Save development time and help ensure your menu contains the correct links with the SearchFit website menu template. The website menu template automatically generates your website menu based on your current Product Catalog structure. For example, the website menu template can render website templates containing links to your Category Types, Categories and Sub Categories. The menu is generated in an automatic fashion. When a new Category is added to the store, it will automatically appear in the menu. Best of all, the menu is highly customizable and lets you render your menu using the html of your choice, such as an unordered list. It’s also possible to automatically add class attributes to the links corresponding to the currently viewed page in order to give them a different appearance. This helps the user more easily identify their current location on your site.

Recently, the SearchFit website menu template was enhanced to allow the construction of mega menus. Specifically, you are now able to convert your menu to a multi column layout. You can specify the number of links per column and the html tag that is used to wrap each column. The website menu template renders the html needed for the mega menu. Currently, there is no premade CSS or JavaScript available in the SearchFit Control Panel related to the mega menu. A web developer can add custom JavaScript and CSS to the SearchFit Control Panel to determine the look and functionality of the menu. Visit the SearchFit Control Panel | "Design" tab | "Template Storage" screen | "Website Menu" template to create your own mega menu and view examples.

These new SearchFit Website Menu attributes make the mega menu possible:

group-every: Specify the number of links per column in the mega menu dropdowns.
group-wrapper-tag: Specify the tag that should wrap each column in the mega menu dropdowns.

See the template code below for example usage.

Example Code for Website Mega Menu Template

<menu-categorytypes>
<ul>
<foreach-categorytype>
<li class="mega mega_AUTO_GENERATED_CATEGORYTYPE_ISSELECTED_SUFFIX">
<a href="AUTO_GENERATED_CATEGORYTYPE_URL">
AUTO_GENERATED_CATEGORYTYPE_NAME</a>
<menu-categories show-when="always">
<div class="mega_content">
<foreach-category group-every="16" group-wrapper-tag="div">
<a class="mega_h" href="AUTO_GENERATED_CATEGORY_URL">
AUTO_GENERATED_CATEGORY_NAME</a>
<menu-subcategories show-when="always">
<foreach-subcategory><a href="AUTO_GENERATED_SUBCATEGORY_URL">
AUTO_GENERATED_SUBCATEGORY_NAME</a>
</foreach-subcategory>
</menu-subcategories> 
</foreach-category&gt
</div>
</menu-categories>
</li>
</foreach-categorytype>
</ul>
</menu-categorytypes>

Please contact us today if you have questions about SearchFit or would like our web development team to build your mega menu.

Showing quality product images is important for any website. The right product images greatly enhance the look of your website, make customers more excited about your products and generate more sales. Showing alternate product photos, such as photos in in different angles and situations gives the customer a more realistic perception of your products. Visitors love to learn about your products. Along with informative descriptions, great product photos can give the customer all she needs to make a buying decision. For those who have access to a SearchFit control panel, you can view the automated image sizing settings on the "Images" tab of the "Configure Products" screen. To see examples of automatic image galleries, visit the example galleries on the SearchFit demo site. Please let us know if we you have questions about how SearchFit’s image-related features can benefit your website.

Benefits of Image Resizing

For any ecommerce website, using some type of batch or automatic method to resize product photos is a no brainer. The alternative is to resize each product photo to the desired sizes individually. Can you imagine how long this would take for a store with thousands of products with several image sizes per product? We understand the importance of saving development time by automating common tasks and are glad to let you know that SearchFit offers automated image resizing. While performing a bulk product import, or adding products individually using the control panel, you have the ability to upload a single high resolution image and have automatically sized by the system. For example, if your store shows one image size on your category page, and another size on your detailed product page with even more size variations elsewhere, SearchFit can take your single, high-resolution image and create all the desired sizes for you automatically. This has been an extremely welcome addition to the SearchFit feature set because it saves hours of repetitive web development work and helps ensure consistent image sizing sitewide.

The “Configure Products” screen in SearchFit allows you to specify image dimensions and quality for all image types.

Image Types in SearchFit

In SearchFit lingo, there are two kinds of images that show products. “Product Images" are the images that appear on your category pages, detailed product pages, checkout pages and everywhere throughout your website. “Extra Images" are your alternate product images. “Extra Images" can be used to create product photo galleries which show a combination of the “Product Image" and “Extra Images". For example, on your detailed product pages, you may show a display with a “Big Product Image". Beneath the “Big Product Image", you may place several “Small Extra Images". Then, each time the user clicks the “Small Extra" image, the “Big Product Image" changes to show the “Big" version of the “Small" image.

SearchFit "Product" Images

Appear On: Category Pages, Detailed Product Pages, Product Groups, Checkout Pages
Available Sizes: Large, Big, Small, Thumbnail Tiny

SearchFit "Extra" Images

Appear On: Detailed Product pages as part of an image gallery
Available Sizes: Extra, Small, Thumbnail

How Image Resizing Works in SearchFit

Automatically resizing your product images requires two main steps. First visit the “Configure Products" screen > “Images" tab. This screen will allow you to specify the dimensions and image quality of each image size. The second step is to add your images to the system. This can be done one-by-one using the “Products" screen in the SearchFit control panel, or via bulk import. The below instructions are general steps and assume you will be adding your images via bulk import. It’s important to note that your images are automatically sized when you add them to the system and not each time you adjust the size settings on the “Configure Products" screen.

How to Use Image Resizing

1. Go to the SearchFit Control Panel | “Configure Products" screen | “Images" tab. For each image type that you would like to automatically size/create check the corresponding check box and enter values for dimensions and quality settings.
2. Upload your images to the SearchFit control panel using the “Dynamic File Storage" screen. The uploaded images should be at least as big as the largest version of the image that you would like to show on the website, but can be larger if desired. For example, you could upload your very high resolution images to the Dynamic File Storage area.
3. Use the SearchFit Control Panel “Products” screen | “Import Records" form to upload your images. You only need to upload the “Large" sized “Product Image" and “Extra" sized “Extra Images" per product. During the import process, the system will automatically size and create your images.

Image Galleries with SearchFit

Image galleries help increase your website conversion rate in different ways. Having a great image display makes customers excited about your products and can give them the emotional push they need to make a buying decision. Image galleries also help customers explore your product. Customers can see the products in different angles and situation, giving them a more realistic perception of the product. This helps give customers the details about the product they need in order to make a buying decision.

Automatic Image Galleries

Once you have added all your images to the system, SearchFit allows you to quickly add an attractive image gallery to your detailed product pages. Choose from a variety of premade galleries that require little setup work on your part. Simply add one of the provided code snippets to your product template and the gallery will appear.See the example galleries on the SearchFit demo site for example code.

Custom Image Galleries

Web Developers will appreciate the ability to build their own image gallery from scratch. SearchFit includes an Extra Images web service that provides all image photo url’s on a per product basis in JSON format. If the premade galleries do not fit your needs, or your design calls for an extremely customized way of showing product images, then the Extra Images web service is for you. Here is an example of a value that a JavaScript programmer could use (on a SearchFit detailed product page) to fetch all the image URL’s (in JSON format) for a particular product and use them in a custom programmed gallery:

SFUI.ThisWebsite.getPublicJsonService("products/getProductExtraImagesInfo") + "&pid=" + current_product_id

We are happy to offer these time-saving, site-enhancing features for your product images. We hope you are able to benefit from these and will continue to provide additional features that improve your online business. Please let us know if you are interested in having our development team assist you with setting up an image gallery.

We are proud to announce the release of SearchFit v8.10. The newest SearchFit version contains many new features and changes, but just a portion of them are discussed here. Please visit the SearchFit forum to read the full release notes. In this article, we’ve included some of the stand out features including Dependent Options with Inventory Control per Option, New Product Feeds and Mega Menus. Other items in the article include some feature highlights from SearchFit v8.6 – v8.9. Many improvements and new features have been introduced into SearchFit with these releases. We hope that our current customers and those considering the SearchFit ecommerce platform will benefit from these with increased traffic, usability and conversion rate.

SearchFit Feature Highlights in SearchFit v8.10

Dependent Options with Inventory Control Per Option

You now have the ability to control what combination of options a customer can select. For example, if you sell Blue and Red T-Shirts in sizes Small and Large, but your Small Blue T-Shirt is out of stock, you can now prevent customers from ordering that particular combination. The new Dependent Options System allows you to specify certain option combinations that are or are not possible to select. You can also track inventory per Option so that any product/option combination that is out of stock will not be selectable.

New Product Feeds Available: PriceGrabber & NexTag

PriceGrabber and NexTag join the list of automated Product Feeds available in SearchFit. The full list of available product feeds can be seen in the SearchFit Control Panel | “Product Feeds” screen. Now you can automatically build, customize and deliver your product feed to Price Grabber and NexTag at a specified interval.

Build Automated ‘Mega Menus’ Using the SearchFit Website Menu Template

The SearchFit website menu template has been enhanced to allow you to create “Mega Menus”. A mega menu is a horizontal dropdown navigation where each dropdown may contain multiple columns of information. The new Website Menu Template attribute “group-every” allows you specify how many links should be included in each column. Mega menus have been shown to offer better usability compared to multi-level dropdown menus.

SearchFit Feature Highlights from v8.6 – v8.9

Import Data into Any Field in Your DataBase with Enhanced Importing Functionality

The product import engine has been enhanced to allow store owners to specify special columns in the import file that would target arbitrary database product fields. This way, additional product fields can be updated even if they are not allowed to be specified on the product import form. The header of these special columns should be in the format {$product.fieldName=}, where could be any database product field name. For example, to update if the product is allowed to be ordered or not the header of the column in the import file must be specified by {$product.fieldName=enable_toorder}. Warning! This capability has to be used with CAUTION and to update only product fields that could be updated directly and don’t require additional business logic. The System is Not Responsible for any mass product updates using this function.

Automatically Add Canonical Link Tags to Your Product Links

In SearchFit lingo, a “Product Link” is a duplicate product. Beyond that, a Product Link shares a common set of attributes with its master product, such as price, sku, etc. This way, when you edit the price of the Master Product, the Product Link is automatically updated. Other product attributes can be differentiated between the Master Product and the Product Link, such as descriptions, images, name, etc. This is useful when you have the same product in multiple categories and want to customize each Product Link to better match its parent Category. SearchFit now has the ability to add Canonical Link tags to the detailed product pages corresponding to all your Product Links. These canonical link tags let search engines know the URL of the Master Product and help you avoid being penalized for having duplicate content.

SearchFit is now Integrated with the StoneEdge Order Manager

The SearchFit Stone Edge integration supports Orders Import, Real Time Inventory, Customer Import, Product Import, Order Status Updates. StoneEdge streamlines and automates the process of managing orders, customers, inventory, shipping, drop-shipping, and credit card transactions.

Google Base Feed Enhanced to Support Google Taxonomy

Help Google Base to better categorize your products. The SearchFit Google Base Feed has been enhanced to support Google Taxonomy. New screens have been implemented to allow the store owner to automatically download the google taxonomy entries. The taxonomies can be assigned to category types, categories, and products. The assigned entries will be automatically provided to google during the feed create and submit. Made the feed generation to split feeds into 100k products or less per file. Product extra images are now included in the feed. Allowed google base filtering by category type and category. Ability to customize the feed suffix file name to easy track the target feed problems in the google emails.

Integrated with Bing CashBack

Bing CashBack has two parts, a product feed, and an order feed. Your products will show up in the Bing search engine and have their CashBack offers displayed based on the product feed (found at Marketing/Product Feeds). When a customer originates from the Bing CashBack program and completes a purchase of a Bing CashBack enabled product then SearchFit will automatically report the order to Bing. The order feed submits all eligible orders to Bing in a once a day batch. Read More about SearchFit Bing CashBack integration.

Integrated with Interactive ShipWorks

ShipWorks connects to SearchFit. It downloads your orders and makes it easy to create shipping labels, manage customers and emails, and update the online status of each order. Streamline your order processing and CRM with this powerful application.

Improve the Product Display on Your Category Pages with Quick Look

Implemented Product Quick Look feature that allows visitors to mouse over the product images on the category pages and have a quick look at the details of the product with a click of a button while staying on the same page. The product details appear in a panel that can be closed, or used to purchase the item.

Enhance Your Product Option Layout with Image-Based Inputs

Implemented the new Product Option Group Layouts: a) CheckBox as Image per Option b) Radio Button as Image per Option. For example, if you are offering color-based options, then you can create an option display where customers click on a color swatch instead of a standard radio button.

Enjoy A Huge Time Savings with The Ability to Automatically Resize Images

Just import a high-resolution version of each of your Product Images and SearchFit can automatically create all the necessary sizes. This includes the product images that appear on your Category Pages, Checkout Pages, Detailed Product Pages and Sitemap. Also included are the “Extra” images that appear in your image galleries. The New “Images” tab on the “Configure Products” screen allows you to specify the dimensions of each image type.

Improved Reporting Between SearchFit and Power Search

View reports that show how much revenue your site is earning from products that customers find using Power Search. SearchFit now automatically provides PowerSearch with orders data to allow PowerSearch to build sales reports based on the searches and placed orders. The new Power Search report is titled “Daily Sales By Searches”.

Easily Create Custom, Automated Product Displays With “Intelligent Product Groups”

The “Product Groups” feature has been enhanced to allow the store owner to create unlimited Intelligent Product Groups. Intelligent groups are dynamic groups where the selected group type specifies what products are to be included in the group. The intelligent groups can be created for all or specific category types and for all or specific categories. Store owners can specify discounts, create social apps,and generate individual intelligent groups. The supported intelligent product group types are:

• Best Selling Products By Qty
• Best Selling Products By Revenue
• Best Selling Products By Profit
• Most Recent Products (New Arrivals)
• Top Ranked Products
• Most Ranked Products
• Most Profitable Products
• Products On Sale

Connect With Your Customers By Creating an Automatic, Customized RSS Feed

The new Marketing/RSS Feeds feature allows the store owner to create unlimited RSS Feeds using any intelligent product group. This means you can have an RSS feed containing your most recent products, top selling products, etc. Customers can add your RSS Feed to their RSS Feed Reader to receive updates whenever your feed changes.

Showcase Your Products with Alternate & Enlarged Images using Photo Albums

Add an enhanced product display to your detailed product pages with SearchFit photo albums. SearchFit now allows you to store a set of alternate product images called “Extra Images”. These images work with SearchFit’s automatic image sizing feature. SearchFit offers a set of premade gallery types that makes setup quick and easy. Developers can use the SearchFit Photo Album web service to make a completely custom gallery layout.