How to Do an Ecommerce Site Audit-Part 2

Knowing how to do an ecommerce site audit isn’t something that you just leave college or an Internet Retailer Conference with.

It’s knowledge typically gathered during the course of years of tinkering on your own sites or those of your clients. In our case, it is the product of more than 15 years of ecommerce expertise, labor, toil, blood, sweat ….(OK, I’m laying it on a little thick here but you get the idea). We’ve been around long enough, though, to understand what to do when a client asks us how to keep a user interface (UI) that is converting well.

Yesterday, I described a recent project in which a long-time client decided to change ecommerce platforms from Yahoo! Merchant Solutions to Magento. Among our responsibilities during this transition was reproducing the website UI for this Global 1000 brand. One of the mandates was to reproduce the current UI on the new one, a process that began by identifying everything comprising the incumbent UI. (I summarized this ecommerce site audit in the first post).

Today, we’re looking at some of the content that we included in the audit report we presented to this client. We divided our findings into sections based on site architecture so that everyone would have context. Below are three sections that are representative of the report and the level of detail necessary to ensure a site migration like this is successful:

1. Footer
2. Top-level Category Pages
3. Shopping Cart

1. Footer 

• All footer content is pulled from the global variable: “2011-footer”

  • Variables: “footer-links-column-1” and “footer-links-column-2” populate the respective column listings of links found in the footer

• Email subscription managed by custom PHP scripting located on the Rackspace server

  • Location: http://services.sitedomain.com/newsletters/sitedomain.php

  • Custom “privacy info” pop-in located next to the submit button

    • JavaScript used to make the pop-in functional

      • Location: XXX…….js

• Credit Card logos displayed as last element in the footer. (included link to images)

2. Interior Page: Top level Categories (super categories & aggregate pages)

• These pages appear in the global top navigation in the header of the site.

  • Their children sections are displayed upon hovering the main links, in a dropdown/flyout menu

• Pages include:

  • supercategory.html

    • This is the main display of all “Top Level Sections”, and their respective sub-category pages (1 level deep) in an HTML unordered list

      • The “Top Level Sections” are pulled from the homepage’s contents field, and each section has its own “contents” variable pulled and lists the first 4 ids in the field in the unordered list

        • If the section’s contents field exceeds 4 IDs, a “view all subcategories” link is listed at the bottom of the unordered list which takes the user to the parent Section

      • The main Sections listed have their images pulled from Yahoo! hosting via PHP script located there: (included link here)

        • XYZ = section ID

  • new-at-sitedomain.html

    • This page lists all new items added to the main Top Level Sections (IDs in the “contents” field on the homepage) based on the evaluation of the product level variables: “added-to-estore-date” and “new-date-cutoff” (added-to-estore-date value must be GREATER THAN new-date-cutoff)

    • Each Top Level Section is listed in its own container, with the latest 5 items displayed in a single row, 5 column display

      • There is also a “View All items in XYZ” link in the top right area of each Section container

    • If a Top Level Section does not have any new items added (based on the evaluation listed above), the Section is not displayed on this page

    • The product images displayed are pulled from Yahoo! hosting via PHP script located here: (included link to images)

      • XYZ = product ID

  • sitedomain-on-sale-now.html

    • This page pulls the latest designated “Sale Items” based on products that have a “sale-price” listed

    • Each Top Level Section is listed in its own container, with the latest 5 items displayed in a single row, 5 column display

      • There is also a “View All items in XYZ” link in the top right area

        • The actual number of items within the section is also parsed into this link verbiage

    • The product images displayed are pulled from Yahoo! hosting via PHP script located here: (included link to images)

      • XYZ = product ID

  • special-offers.html

    • This page displays custom HTML via page-level variables: “Promotional-row-Xa-zone-Xb-html”, where Xa can increment to 4 and Xb can increment to 2

    • It also displays “On Sale” and “Just Arrived” products, which are populated by the page-level variables: “On-sale-now-ids” and “Just-arrived-ids”

    • The product images displayed are pulled from Yahoo! hosting via PHP script located here: (included link to images)

      • XYZ = product ID

• Baynote Cross Sell

  • Not going to be used moving forward (replaced by Yahoo! standard contents display)

  • These appear in a one-column display, in the right-hand portion of the content area

  • This area is limited to a 3 product display

  • Baynote analytics tracking query strings are applied to each link per product

  • Product images are populated via PHP script located on Yahoo!’s hosting

    • PHP script location here: (included link to images)

      • XYZ = product page ID

3. Shopping Cart

• Moxie chat script (located in the page message of each checkout page)

• Custom styling (See CSS files in lib)

• Custom fields for Order Motion Requirements on shipping/billing page

  • field-7

    • value = query string of item id’s in cart following this formatting:

      • url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sitedomain.com%2Fitem1.html&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sitedomain.com%2Fitem2.html

  • field-8

    • OMX TaxExempt value (yes o no) based on myaccount GSA valuee

• Baynote Cross Sell

• Custom image for Bill Me Later

• Data Warehouse tags

• Removing certain states from Dropdown list (Javascript)

• Promotions Manage Check

• Google Adwords Tracking

• MSN adcenter tracking

• Misc Shopping Comparison Engine tracking beacons

• Clickshift code

Now that is how to do an ecommerce site audit! In Part 3, we’ll look at another section of our report,  the many different web and ecommerce technologies, products and services that had been integrated over time into the site code.

Tweet

Share