I am looking for the best way to differentiate our catalog among multiple stores. Until now, we have geared our catalog (item) content to one store. We are now starting our second store with Americommerce because we found the system to be exceptional at targeting niches within a particular category. Americommerce's SEO customization ability is not matched anywhere else that I know of. Over the last year, we have not had one duplicate customer generated by our Americommerce site. That means that all Americommerce generated business was incremental!

If anyone has success using the Merge Codes to differentiate the catalog based on multiple stores, I would greatly appreciate any advice. The search engines are getting smarter every year and can actually find duplicate content within a particular page. I am looking for a way to avoid the "duplication penalty" that happens often with the major search engine.

We would need to differentiate all product page meta tags as well as detail content. Is there a custom merge I can create per store to accomplish this?

 Thanks in advance for your help.

 - John

John, one way is to use the different description fields available on the Product Editor if you only need one per product per store.  Then you would use the merges for the long description fields in your theme.

 Another method I've seen used, which works great for people wanting to use a 3rd party HTML editor, is to create static HTML files on each site in the same folder / file name structure and use the External Content merge in the actual Description fields to load the external file.  For instance if you made a file called "/Product/WidgetLongDescrption.html" on each of your stores, then on the description field in the Product Editor use the external content merge to point to this file, each site could have its own long description, completely unique and easy to manage with any HTML editor that can use SFTP.

I like #2 for management and it's nice to use a tool to manage those, the only drawback is searching the descriptions becomes difficult so on-site search may not function optimally.

You can also use ##IF merges and use the StoreID one to differentiate content within most fields that render on the front end.  Our merge logic will strip away the stuff for all the other stores and only show it for the store in question.  This is handy because it also works in page titles and other fields and on site searching still is fully intact.

Ed,

Thanks much! It sounds like the # # IF merge would be most optimal for differentation and therefore sales. I know it would be a more work to manage but if I can actually use it to change titles, that is fantastic. Before we get started, are there any limitations on field length or such that could give us problems during import?

Thanks again for your help,

 John

Depending on your lengths and which fields we're talking about you may run into some field length issues. Import validation will let you know tho.  There's some tricks around even that though if it becomes a big hiccup.  We can always do a lil custom dev to lengthen field(s) or you can use other merges to point to longer fields/storage spots and call those merges from the field that is too short.

For Instance: Say page title is too short, put ##LONGDESCRIPTION5## or ##CUSTOMFIELD[Name]## (not sure on the syntax of that one) in page title, then in the field you use you can stuff your longer text.  Again, this could affect search a bit, as page title is given more weight than long description or custom fields, but it should still find the words in those other fields.

Ideally, i'd much prefer to see the field lengthened if you run into this.  We have pretty long fields though so try it without any work-arounds first. 

The cool thing about the conditional merges is you can tailor content based on your visitors too!  Customer types of Wholesale can see extra wholesale only text...visitors coming from Google can see specific content...visitors from Bing Cashback can be shown a big Cashback icon...so much can be done with them. 

Ed,

 I have tested this and it works great for the new website. Does it work for the site feeds as well? I don't want to have a bunch of merge codes ending up in my feeds.

 Let me know.

Thanks,

John

Ed,

Thanks. Just so you know, I have joined as a different name as I didn't know that you allowed robots to search here.

 All of the suggestions have tested well except for the feeds. I submitted a support request and hope that I can find help there.

 Please let me know if you have any other suggestions.

Thanks again!

Any progress? I would like to discuss the fact that this feature was supposed to be a DevShare. Let me know if you are interested.

I read the release logs and this was mentioned as a Hotfix some time ago. However, when we use "conditional" and some "Product page" merges they end up in the feeds as the actual merge code. We were updated to the latest version after a support request. Perhaps there is something we are doing wrong? Any advice would be appreciated!

Thanks

This may have been some misinformation on my part, all of the partner feeds 50+ and our ShopZilla feed all support this.  The free GoogleBase feed is still running outside of AmeriCommerce and does not support the merges.  We will be sucking that feed into the AmeriCommerce application soon too so that it will run the same as the other 50+ feeds.  I apologize if my previous statement was misleading, we will be bringing in GoogleBase to this same framework soon.  If you already use our feed service, and use GoogleBase from it instead of the admin console, it will now support the merges as well.

http://www.americommerce.com/comparison-shopping-engines.html