ProStores Tips and Tutorials – One Take Media

Quick tip:

When you have a product that has been discontinued and there is a new model coming out, you can replace that old product’s information with the new model’s information. Note: this works best if the product is a new/update version of the old one.

Example: http://www.fs4sports.com/servlet/the-772/Easton-SV12-Baseball-Bat/Detail. Note: ProStores uses the first 4 words of your product title as part of the url.

This was last year’s model and was out of stock, but ForSports got the 2010 model of the bat and I replaced the old product image, updated the product title (keeping the same first 4 words to keep the url the same), attributes, pricing, etc.

The reason this works is that this page already has been online for over a year and has better rank than a brand new page. So now you have your updated product, a well aged url, and a much better chance of ranking well and getting customers.

Use these htaccess rules to minimize or even eliminate CSS background-image “flickering” in MSIE6.

# minimize image flicker in IE6
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpg A2592000
ExpiresByType image/png A2592000

Steel Blue – $299 – Preview Steel Blue ProStores Ready Template – Purchase the Steel Blue ProStores Template. Includes 30 minutes of Customization time by One Take Media!

We have two other ProStores Templates:

Earthy – $299 – Preview Earthy ProStores Ready Template – Purchase the Earthy ProStores Template. Includes 30 minutes of Customization time by One Take Media!

Streamlined Modern – $399 – Preview Streamlined Modern ProStores Ready Template – Purchase the Streamlined Modern ProStores Template. Includes 30 minutes of Customization time by One Take Media!

Do you like these ProStores Ready templates but would like some changes or a different color? Let us know! We can accommodate you. Our Contact Form

*UPDATE* Merchant’s stores are coming online.

*UPDATE* ProStores is working with the power company to restore working power and are attempting to get back up to full capacity in 2-3 hours.

*UPDATE* PG&E Power that services the San Jose area has upgraded the outage from under to 50 customers affected to 50-5,000 affected. No official word from PG&E on when things will be restored. If you must call ProStores please be patient and remember that they can’t do anything about the power.

Keeping your customer’s updated is a good reason to get on Twitter or some other social media platform. I’ve got mine up and will keep updating as I have information, you can follow me if you would like for quicker updates.
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Well folks due to the bad storms in San Jose CA, power is down at the California ProStores offices. Right now this affects ProStores.com and your admin pages. City power officials are working to restore power.

Follow my updates on my twitter account

I will be updating primarily on Twitter.

Article on the storms and power outages.

Heh, i feel like in the past month I’ve had each of these conversaions.
The vendor-client relationship in the real world:

I wish this wasn’t so true… If it wasn’t so frustrating it’d be funny.

Follow us on Twitter For updates, early news, and sometimes limited time, twitter follower only offers!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Years!

***UPDATE***

Found a way around this, just put in the root domain, i.e. www.perrysjewelry.com without the /servlet/StoreFront on it. That pretty much makes it a non issue.

***UPDATE***

Very recently Google made a change to their Webmaster Tools that will adversely affect a ProStores store that wants to add their site and get it
verified. They have started to automatically append a trailing ‘/’ slash to the urls entered into their ‘Add a site’ function.

Google Webmaster Tools is a great website dashboard that you can add your site to, it allows you access to reports, error tracking, site speed tracking, sitemap upload, SiteLinks, as well as the infamous “Help I’ve been banned from Google!” reinclusion request form.

There are two ways to verify your site in Webmaster Tools;

1. Add a ‘meta’ tag to the Header template above the ‘/head’ tag.
2. You can upload an html file to the root folder of your store.

Problem here is that typically you don’t have access to your root folder ‘/servlet/StoreFront’ so you are left with option #1.

This issue with Webmaster Tools directly affects ProStores sites because it changes the URL of the Store that it looks at to verify your meta tag. A ProStores site thats on standard hosting ends its URLs without a trailing slash.

Example: http://www.perrysjewelry.com/servlet/the-Women%27s-Jewelry/Categories if you add a trailing slash you kill the URL and the ProStores software generates a 404 error.

Example: http://www.perrysjewelry.com/servlet/the-Women%27s-Jewelry/Categories/. For whatever reason, probably CPU cycles, there isn’t any redirection done when you visit a ProStores URL that has a trailing slash. So instead of the site sending you to the page without the slash it dies and gives a 404.

This 404 error causes verification to fail and denying access to the best parts of Webmaster Tools.

This issue also directly interferes with a ProStores store’s ability to upload a sitemap to them because you can’t have access to Webmaster Tools at all until you are verified.

If you have already verified your site before this change went through then you should be ok.

If you are on a custom hosting solution, or running on a version of ProStores 8.0 or so you may not have this issue as you probably have a different URL scheme or have the ability to do some URL re-writing.

I have forwarded my thoughts and research to ProStores already and I hope to get Google’s attention as well. If you have a ProStores store, I would log into Webmaster Tools, click help, and fill out a help request on their user forums. Draw some attention to the issue and hopefully we can get a solution.

- Matt

Both my Grandpas served their country and while they didn’t talk about what they did much I always loved looking at them in their old pictures.

To all of you Men and Women who have and are serving our country, “Courage is fear holding on a minute longer. -George S. Patton”.

Thank you for holding on a minute longer!

If your shipping promotions aren’t working since the upgrade you need to make sure you enter an End Date. If you don’t the promotion will not work.

If you want a promotion that doesn’t end just enter 1/1/2050 and that should work just fine.

Hope this helps!

Ever get to the point where you’re out of stock and its been discontinued? Typically you just delete the item or un-check ‘active’ to hide it.

Why is this a bad idea? Because that product has been gathering authority (or Link Juice) from the search engines and if you just hide then boom all that authority is gone and wasted!

Also you then have potential customers coming to your site landing on a page that says “Sorry, no matches were found containing ****** “. This isn’t search friendly, nor is it visitor friendly and people just aren’t patient any more.

I’ve found that a better way to handle it is to keep the product live, keep all the nice content that is bringing you rankings, and create a duplicate Product Detail template that leaves out the tag that adds in the Add to Cart template. This effectively removes the Add to Cart button. You can even replace that tag with “We are Sorry, this Product is Discontinued”.

You will need to assign that new template you created to the product. Open the Product up in your Store Admin and load up the Product Information page so you can see the Basic Information section and look for ‘Product Detail Template:’ and then pick the new product detail template from the dropdown list.

Finally, you find other products that are similar to the discontinued one and add them to the Related section for the discontinued product.

This way you keep the traffic coming in, you send the authority you’ve gathered to products that could use it, and give your customers some additional options.