SellingPoint System Features

Live Editing of Your Online Store’s Catalog Structure

Jeremy Tilley — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:14:12 GMT

Your SellingPoint online store has no doubt grown in size as you gradually add more products. You’ve done this by publishing a SellingPoint catalogs over time. However, what if you want to change the structure of your online store by moving around categories and product? What is you simply want to rename or delete a single category or product? In the past this required that you prepare a new SellingPoint catalog with these changes and then publishing that in it’s entirety. This could be a time consuming task if you’re dealing with thousands of products.

Enter live catalog structure editing! A new feature in SellingPoint Management Studio (versions 5.5.929 and later) allows you to take a shortcut and make simple changes to the structure of your online store. (Note that this is for simple structural changes. Don’t look to this feature to make in-depth changes to a product or adding a new product. You can still accomplish such changes easily by publishing an updated catalog.)

Here’s how to use it:

From within SellingPoint Management Studio, access the account settings for the online store you want to edit

Click here for directions on how to access your store’s settings

From the General tab, scroll down and click Edit Catalog Structure
You will see a window as shown below allowing you to edit your store’s catalog structure:

Note: Changes made using this interface are done in real-time and cannot be undone. Be careful when removing items as the only way to get them back will be to republish your original SellingPoint catalog.

Here are some of the modifications you can make:

To add a new category, click the New Category button in the toolbar. If you want it under an existing category, make sure that parent category is selected before you click New Category. If you want it as a new root category, ensure that no category is selected.
To move a category, just drag and drop with your mouse.
To rename a category, just double click the category and enter a new name.
To remove a category, right click on the category with your mouse and choose Remove.
To move a product, select it in the list to the right and drag and drop it to the new category.
To rename a product, just double click the product and enter a new name.
To remove a product, right click on the product with your mouse and choose Remove.
If you have several categories that are empty with no products in them, it can be useful to use the Remove Empty Categories button in the toolbar to quickly remove such folders.

How to Access an Online Store’s Account Settings

Jeremy Tilley — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:01:17 GMT

If you need to make changes to how a SellingPoint online store behaves, functions, or even looks, you can make such changes by accessing the store’s settings. Once way to access your account is by clicking on the Exchange Accounts button across the top of SellingPoint Management Studio as shown here:

You will then be presented with a tree view that displays one or more folders with SellingPoint accounts in them. It will look something like this:

Each of these accounts represent an online store. To make it easier for you to access, you will notice that this tree view appears throughout SellingPoint Management Studio. To access your store’s settings, just double click the mouse on the account, which will bring up a window with details about the account. At the bottom, you will see a button labeled More Settings. If you have access to the store’s settings, you’ll be able to click this button and see all of the settings as shown here:

The Easy Way to Update

Jeremy Tilley — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 04:06:01 GMT

We're always working to improve and enhance all of the software in the SellingPoint suite. As a result, we offer regular updates for free to our customers active in the SellingPoint Support Contract Program. If you are eligible for updates to SellingPoint Management Studio, there is an easy way to get those updates installed on your computer: Let SellingPoint do it for you!

By default, when you start SellingPoint Management Studio it will checks for updates automatically. If an update is available, you’ll see a message like this:

Just click Yes to continue on. If you have this auto-checking feature turned off, you’ll need to check for updates manually by following these steps:

Click the application button in the upper right
Select the Tools menu and choose Check for Updates

Either way, you should get a window that looks like this if an update is available:

At this point, simply click the Download and Install Update button. The window will display the download progress as shown here:

When finished, the setup program will start at which point you can follow the onscreen instructions to complete the update.

Of course you can always download the program update from our web site if that’s what you prefer. Simply go to http://www.sellingpointsystem.com/download.aspx and download the setup file from there.

Why Are Some of My Microvellum Products Not Imported?

Jeremy Tilley — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 02:03:52 GMT

Have you ever gotten this message while importing a Microvellum library of products into SellingPoint?

At first glance it might seem like there’s something wrong, but this is actually a great proofing tool built into SellingPoint that you can use to save a lot of time and frustration. How?

Web sites can be a very unforgiving environment and so web pages need to be formatted as accurately as possible. Over the years we have identified common mistakes or misconfigurations that can later cause headaches when the web site doesn’t work as expected. To avoid this, SellingPoint performs no less than 100 steps of validation to ensure that your library will not fail online. While we are constantly improving the ability for SellingPoint to automatically correct these problems, some of them are best corrected by an engineer. This is where SellingPoint can save you even more time.

If a product fails to be imported, it will need to be corrected to meet Microvellum’s and SellingPoint’s standards before it will be cataloged. To assist the engineer, SellingPoint will create a log detailing any problems during the import. Open this log and scan it for items in red text as these are the products that were not imported. Usually there will be details under the product name that tell you what went wrong, where the problem lies, and how to fix it. For example, here is a portion of a log showing us that there is a problem with a duplicate prompt name:

Feel free to contact Vesigo Studios for more information on ensuring your Microvellum library is configured properly so as to avoid any potential problems during the import process.

Improved Compatibility with Microvellum Libraries

Jeremy Tilley — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 01:15:47 GMT

In an effort to continue supporting new features and changes across Microvellum libraries, SellingPoint’s Microvellum Library Connector has been updated to include support for new version 67 libraries. This makes it possible for companies using these new libraries to import them into a SellingPoint catalog quickly and easily.

When first importing a Microvellum library, SellingPoint will now ask you what version of library you are targeting:

This allows you to use both the older and current versions interchangeably. SellingPoint even gives you the option to merge the two later on to form a single catalog. This makes it an excellent option for companies looking to get their products online with SellingPoint but are still in the middle of the process of converting to the new library format.

You will also notice in the newer library connector that there are updated options to specify the files you need to make your newer library work properly in SellingPoint:

Remember to specify these files, especially the correct global file, to ensure that your SellingPoint store will be able to recalculate your formulas successfully. If you see “NAME#” type output in your SellingPoint store product pages, this is caused by missing links in your formulas which is usually caused by missing or incorrect files.

Track Visitors Browsing Your Site

Jeremy Tilley — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:59:33 GMT

SellingPoint offers several tools to help you track activity on your site and starting today another useful tool has been added to your arsenal. SellingPoint now makes it possible to see a list of all pages a registered customer has viewed on your site, in the order they were visited. This makes it possible to recreate the path a customer took as they browsed through your site.

How can you make use of this information? It will not only tell you what pages a customer visited, but how they approached them. This helps you to see what products and areas of the site are most visited. When a customer comes to your site, see the area he goes to first. Knowing this can be a big help in designing a more effective layout to your SellingPoint site.

How can you access this information?

From within SellingPoint Management Studio, choose the Web Sites area
At the top, click the User Accounts button
Select a customer from the list, right click with the mouse, and choose View Web Page Visits
A window will appear with a list of the pages the customer visited, with the most recent appearing at the top of the list.
If you want to see the page the customer was looking at, just double click on any of the entries to open your browser to that page.

Track Anonymous Users Coming to Your Site

Jeremy Tilley — Thu, 07 May 2009 08:43:23 GMT

It’s much easy to know what your customers are interested in than to know what the anonymous public is peeking at. If you have a SellingPoint site that is open to the public, then you will have a high percentage of visitors that do not have to log in before they start browsing your site. If they don’t log in, it’s virtually impossible to know anything about them. Or is it?

SellingPoint has seen the need to expose any kind of information about these anonymous users that is possible. Using specialized techniques, SellingPoint can run a trace on the user connecting up to your site. Just as you can do a reverse lookup on a telephone number, SellingPoint uses techniques that do a reverse lookup on the visitor’s computer’s “telephone number”, or IP Address. This results in you being able to see details such as where the visitor is from. If the computer being used is at a business, you have an even better change of the business name being displayed as well.

It also helps to see what anonymous visitors are interested in. While you can use a program such as Google Analytics to see what products people are looking at the most, you can use SellingPoint to directly tell you what they are putting in their shopping cart. Seeing that information can give you a better understanding of what people are most interested in.

All of these features are available in SellingPoint Management Studio by clicking on the Web Sites navigation area and then double clicking on either a Registered Customer or Anonymous User entry.

For an overview of some of the more popular tools for tracking activity in SellingPoint, take a look at this video demonstration.

Integrate Google Analytics Directly Into Your SellingPoint site

Jeremy Tilley — Thu, 07 May 2009 08:42:59 GMT

Understanding who is coming to your web site, where they come from, and what they do when they are there are all important parts of measuring your success in online commerce. As with any investment you make in your business, you need a way of measuring its benefit to the company. Additionally, when you run campaigns you also need a way of accurately measuring the affects of such marketing. In the world of connected commerce, you need to rely on web site statistic and analytic tools.

These tools will give you information about many aspects of the traffic flowing through your web site. Generally you will see a lot of detailed information such as:

What state or country the visitor originates from
How many times that visitor has returned to your site
How long were they on your site and what pages did they look at during that time
When they entered your site, how did they find you
If they used a search engine to find you, what keyword or phrase did they use
When they left your site, where did they go next
What kind of computer and web browser are they using

All of these details may be interesting in themselves, but the real power is putting them together and performing analysis on them. This allows you to see a history of your efforts and even forecast future trends with accuracy. Instead of blindly offering a web site to the public, these analytical tools allow you to refine your site and respond on a daily basis to increase traffic and even purchases.

A popular analytic tool that many web sites use is Google Analytics. This is a free service from Google and will do a good job in reporting everything you need to know about your site. Follow this link to watch a video describing all you need to know about Google Analytics:

http://services.google.com/analytics/tour/index_en-US.html

SellingPoint deeply integrates with Google Analytics. This will give you a very nice view of your sites activity. And since both SellingPoint and Google Analytics allow you to keep sites separate, if you have multiple SellingPoint sites, you’ll be able to get a great breakdown on each site individually. Now you can track your store for architects, contractors, dealers, consumers, and others independently.

To integrate Google Analytics into a SellingPoint site, follow these steps:

From SellingPoint Management Studio, click the Exchange Accounts button on the Home tab of the ribbon
Locate and double click on the site in the tree view that you want to link to Google Analytics
Click the More Settings button
Select the Statistics tab
Under the Analytics section, change the analysis program to Google Analytics
Paste the tracking code you received from Google when you created a Google Analytics account
Click OK to save the changes and then click OK twice more to go back to the main program screen
You may now click on the Marketing navigation tab and then select the account you just modified in order to see the Google Analytics results directly within SellingPoint

Note that Google may ask you to log in, in which case you simply enter your Google email and password that were used to setup your Google Analytics account. Remember that it takes a little time to aggregate the results and perform an analysis on them. You should allow up to 24 hours for data to start appearing in the reports.

For an overview of some of the more popular tools for tracking activity in SellingPoint, take a look at this video demonstration.

Get the Most Accurate Analysis of Your Site Traffic Through Web Server Logs

Jeremy Tilley — Thu, 07 May 2009 08:42:35 GMT

These tools will give you information about many aspects of the traffic flowing through your web site. Generally you will see a lot of detailed information such as:

What state or country the visitor originates from
How many times that visitor has returned to your site
How long were they on your site and what pages did they look at during that time
When they entered your site, how did they find you
If they used a search engine to find you, what keyword or phrase did they use
When they left your site, where did they go next
What kind of computer and web browser are they using

One such tool is AWStats, which is a free open source web statistics program. AWStats is different from a lot of other statistics programs such as Google Analytics in that it is a program that resides on your server and analyzes your web server’s logs. Others, such as Google Analytics, don’t read the web server’s traffic logs but instead get information via JavaScript snippets that are injected into the page. The difference between the two may sound unimportant, but depending on the types of visitors coming to your site it can make a big difference in the numbers. This happens because not every web browser supports or allows JavaScript. Thus if such a person comes to your site, he remains essentially invisible in that a program like Google Analytics cannot gather any information on that visitor. A statistics program like AWStats does not have this limitation as it directly reads from the server’s logs and thus catches every bit of activity, no matter who it is.

So how do you choose between the two approaches? Most people today use a computer and internet browser that support JavaScript, making solutions like Google Analytics much more popular than they were 5 years ago. If you expect to have a number of people visiting your site using a mobile device such as a cell phone, then the JavaScript issue begins to be a problem then as many of those devices may not have support.

Another factor to consider is that while Google Analytics is free and easy to setup, AWStats does require setup on your web server. This could translate into a charge from your network administrator who would need to set this up on your server. Generally speaking, most SellingPoint users will be better off using Google Analytics. But in the end, it’s nice to know you have the choice.

More information on AWStats is available here:

http://awstats.sourceforge.net/

To integrate AWStats into a SellingPoint site, follow these steps:

From SellingPoint Management Studio, click the Exchange Accounts button on the Home tab of the ribbon
Locate and double click on the site in the tree view that you want to link to AWStats
Click the More Settings button
Select the Statistics tab
Under the Analytics section, change the analysis program to AWStats
Paste the URL you received from your network administrator when AWStats was setup on the server
Click OK to save the changes and then click OK twice more to go back to the main program screen
You may now click on the Marketing navigation tab and then select the account you just modified in order to see the AWStats results directly within SellingPoint

For an overview of some of the more popular tools for tracking activity in SellingPoint, take a look at this video demonstration.

Why Have More Than One SellingPoint Site?

Jeremy Tilley — Sat, 02 May 2009 09:27:06 GMT

A question often asked is why an organization would have the need for more than one online store. After all, most web sites (especially manufacturer sites) have a single listing of all their products. While that’s true, usually these sites only have one copy of their product line showing on a web site because it takes an enormous amount of time and money to maintain anything more than that. Really, if time and money were not an issue, most companies would love to have their products displayed in different ways for different audiences. Therein lays the reason to have more than one SellingPoint site. Take some examples:

Pricing and Availability

Why do most manufacturing companies not put pricing and availability of their products online? Here are some possible answers:

Pricing changes too often and is not worth the effort to constantly update on the site
Pricing is based on quantity or tier of customer and thus not possible to calculate on the site
Pricing includes discounts given to dealers and so fluctuates from customer to customer
Pricing and availability varies depending on the type of customer, such as a residential consumer versus a large dealer

Is your company affected by one or more of these situations? If so, SellingPoint can help eliminate the headaches associated with these situations.

Traditionally if a company wanted to release pricing and availability, it was done by printing different versions of a catalog or price list that was customized to fit the different audiences. Think of being able to do the same thing with SellingPoint sites. Consider the benefits of have a separate site for each of these audiences if appropriate:

The public
Dealers and sales teams
Architects and draftsmen
Contractors
Vendors and suppliers
Internal personnel

The great thing about SellingPoint is that it has been designed from the ground up to work with multiple sites like this. That means you can create and maintain hundreds of sites in a fraction of the time it would take to do otherwise. SellingPoint lets you configure the pricing and availability of your product line on a site by site basis and even on a customer by customer basis. And since your product information is coming dynamically from your ERP system or other source, such as a Microvellum library, you only have to worry about maintaining your data in that one place. SellingPoint makes it easy to accomplish the near impossible manual task of maintaining thousands of products accurately for thousands of customers. Bottom line is that all the time consuming manual labor and heavy lifting of data is taken care of automatically by SellingPoint.

Customizing Design

A second beneficial reason to have more than one SellingPoint site is customizing the design and layout of the site. No doubt you will want to design the site to look attractive and useable depending on the audience you’re addressing. This is especially true when you have a dealer network. Often times the dealer would like to have the site customized to represent their brand. This is a great opportunity to offer your dealers a custom designed site with their logo and colors, allowing them to site down with their customers and create orders directly online.

Tailored Content

Another situation that can arise is the need to post additional content for the audience being served. At times different images need to be displayed for certain products. Textual content may change as well. For example, a dealer may need more specifications and control over product options and someone looking through the public site would need.

Certain files may need to be attached to products, but only for a certain group of people. For instance, architects may need spec sheets and CAD drawings. Those things are easily attached in SellingPoint, but of course they are not appropriate for another audience such as the public.

Keeping Things Separate

Can you imagine the confusion that would result if everyone in your organization shared the same email address or phone number? You would soon need a team of people dedicated to just redirecting the flow of traffic. The same situation can arise when you attempt to run all orders and quotes through a single SellingPoint site. Again, if you have a dealer network or sales team, this can quickly become an issue if orders start rolling in and they are not easily separated.

SellingPoint addresses this potential problem by giving you an order processing interface that can be divided up by site. It’s very much like adding extensions to your phone system or adding email accounts for each person. The end result is that the traffic is redirected automatically to the right people. This way you can have specific customer service personnel dedicated to specific sites and customers.

Security

Last but not least, protecting your content is a big reason to have multiple sites. Each SellingPoint site can be locked down or opened up as much as you would like. Using that to your advantage, you can easily target your audiences and enforce that only the right people see that content. SellingPoint can be configured to work with single user authorization or can be give group authorization. The site can be opened up to public use for browsing or locked down for only private internal use. You can even control whether or not visitors create their own account or if only you control such provisioning.

Final Thoughts

So while most organizations will start off with a single SellingPoint site, there’s no doubt that most will benefit from adding additional sites down the road. Since these sites are rather simple to setup and maintain, it really represents an affordable and smart way of ensuring that your customers and partners have the information they need 24/7 and always up-to-date.

If you have additional questions about multiple SellingPoint sites, don’t hesitate to send me a message.

SellingPoint 5.5 Technology Preview

Jeremy Tilley — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 02:50:26 GMT

Vesigo Studios is pleased to release a technology preview of the newest version of the SellingPoint System. Version 5.5 is a big step forward in streamlining the usefulness of SellingPoint in the daily operations of an organization. With a focus on roles, this new version offers specific features that will prove helpful to:

Inside the manufacturing company:

Engineering
Management
Marketing
I.T.

Outside the manufacturing company:

Sales
Vendors and Suppliers
Dealers and Sales Teams
Architects and Draftsmen
Contractors
Consumers

Current customers of SellingPoint version 5 with active support contracts are eligible for a free upgrade to this new release. Contact Vesigo Studios and request the upgrade be preformed to your account and then head over to the following web site to download the corresponding new version of SellingPoint Management Studio:

http://www.sellingpointsystem.com/download.aspx

Not yet using SellingPoint in your business? We are excited to announce a new evaluation program for those that would like to try SellingPoint before they buy. Contact Vesigo Studios and we will be happy to set up a new trial account for you to use.

Using Custom Order Numbers

Jeremy Tilley — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:55:39 GMT

Getting your order numbers to look right and match the formatting required by company policies is made easier in SellingPoint now due to custom order number masks. SellingPoint will generate a unique number which can be formatted in any way required, giving a professional appearance to all online orders.

With custom order numbers you can:

Enter an order number mask which defines the format of the order number
A order number mask can include alpha-numeric characters including symbols such as dashes
Use the pound symbol (#) as a place holder for a randomly generated number, which length is determined by the order number digit length. This number can be a maximum of 9 digits long. For example, this mask set with a digit length of 9:
C###-###-###
could become this order number:
C161-515-260
While SellingPoint checks that you will not have duplicate order numbers in the system, be sure to use longer order numbers that change often to ensure you do not run out of order numbers

Using SellingPoint to Distribute CAD Files and Spec Sheets

Jeremy Tilley — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:54:38 GMT

Have you ever found the need to make CAD drawings available to architects? Or perhaps specification sheets available to sales people? Distributing those in an organized way and keeping everyone on the correct version is no easy task. A convenient place to put those resources would be with their respective products in SellingPoint, since SellingPoint already takes care of the distribution and versioning of you products now. Now you can, by attaching them directly to your products.

You will find that this new feature is available in SellingPoint Management Studio version 5.0.2318 and newer. Simply open your SellingPoint catalog of products, choose a product, and notice the "File Attachments" tab across the bottom. Clicking that will give you the opportunity to attach as many files as you need, no matter what their type. Your SellingPoint users will then be able to download these files right off the web site.

Welcome to the SellingPoint System Features Blog

Jeremy Tilley — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:54:12 GMT

Regular updates to the SellingPoint System help continue feeding the demand of our users for features that make them more effective in their everyday work. Other features are implemented over time that allow manufacturers to take on different types of assignments, allowing them to diversify the range of work their company can profit by. For some time, it has been requested that we start posting information about these new features so that they’re not missed. Starting March 1st, we are posting the details of each new release under this blog. We will also take the time to describe other features in-between releases that may be of interest.

As always, we are looking forward to hearing your feedback, sharing that with the community, and implementing the features that will empower our users.