Update Feb 23, we've now added 5000 products from my clients supplier's updated Magento db. Sales have more than doubled over the last 12 months!
We’ve added over 1000 new products and new SKU codes throughout. Also updated all Metadata including Schema throughout and built in the facility to add Open Graph Tags (mark up) for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
We are in the process of updating all product images too and storing on AWS but almost the most important thing we have done is to add multiple custom fields to our custom WordPress database to enable us to import directly fields that map precisely to the suppliers Magento database.
What this means is not just that our clients costs for adding and updating new products, launched by their supplier, is kept to a minimum but also that we have the flexibility within the system to optimise for search every aspect of a product and to provide the potential customer with far more information, and options, than would normally be available in the WordPress/Woo commerce database.
There has still been considerable work to make sure that content from Magento translates and functions within WordPress but the results are great and we are really proud of achieving this.
For Touch Ironmongery the investment has been very worthwhile, they have more than doubled sales over the last 12 months even though they are often undercut on price. To counter that we have added a system whereby for larger trade orders we can set specific customer discounts both as default or on the fly.
We've added 3500 products from a magento db to wordpress and all at the top of local search
I built Touch’s original site maybe 7 years ago and with a number of upgrades over the years it has performed well but earlier this year they were offered an opportunity by one of their main suppliers to add 3500 extra products to the site, all with detailed descriptions and superb photographs.
The only downside was that the database holding the product info was written in code for Magento sites and we run WordPress. The two are not readily compatible, my old programming firm regularly converted Magento sites to WordPress and it was always a difficult process but one we always achieved successfully.
I agreed to take the project on and though it was hard, rewriting the database has worked well and converting it to WordPress has added huge opportunities to improve the product SEO direct within the database. The mysql database behind WordPress isn’t always the easiest to work with but it is robust and extremely powerful, offering huge opportunities to promote a site.
To take full advantage of the new products and associated images, we built a new faster and much more mobile friendly site and we set up a new image server with Amazon Web Services to serve the large, high quality images fast, worldwide. I find it slightly comical that Amazon describe the cloud space I have as a ‘digital lake’ and I’ve created a ‘digital bucket’ to fill with images from my server.
I’m guessing we’re trying to humanise programming speak but one thing is clear, the service really works, the delivery fast and faultless. I’ve started to add images from my other clients too and this enables me show higher quality images on all our sites.
The new Touch site went live today and the process of optimising the new images and products has begun.
We included local and product SEO in the database and we can see that every single product is now indexed and comes top on searches for the products in Fulham, where our client is based.
The task is now to compete against other stores listing the same products, many of whom discount heavily and use Google advertising.
We plan to build on the store’s reputation and service and target London specifiers and interior designers primarily.
