One of the goals we’ve set for this year is to optimise our website and your shops for search engines.
We want to make it easier for the well-known search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN,…) to find your shop. You would then start to get free and first-rate visitors from the search engines who are (hopefully) there to buy your shirts. To make this all work like it should, a little effort also needs to be put in on your side.

Part 1 – Meta Element Changes
Shop meta tags will be the first change which will be undertaken (planned for mid-March, but could also be delayed by a few days).
In the future, we will automatically generate the meta tags (title, description, keywords) for your shop from information which you have provided in the user area.
Here’s how the meta tags will look in the future on a product detail page:

continue reading ‘Search Engine Optimisation for your Shops: Meta Tag Changes’

Just a quick update on some good news: I’m happy to announce we closed an investment of 10 Mio Euro, led by Kennet and Accel Partners. Find more background information on Janas CEO Blog, and we also do have more details in the official Press release.

This is a great chance for us, and of course some of you are asking: what do you spend it for?

We don’t have detailed information yet, but I can assure you that we will use it to develop our platform further and grow our international footprint. Here is a list of our priorities for 2009:

• Release features that give our Shop Partners opportunities for more “front doors” into their shops from across the Web.
• Inspire our direct customers who wear their Spreadshirts and la Fraise shirts “every time they are clean” with new ideas for favorite shirts and gifts.
• Enable top partners — like 2008 partners CNN, Nissan, Tchibo, and EA — to develop unique apparel offerings tailored to their audience.
• Continued development of our apparel selection to offer personalization for fashionable clothes including, and beyond, the tee.
• Ensure we deliver the above in a cost effective, responsible way taking into account the global economic environments and our core markets and businesses.

And just to begin with a rather small, but interesting and long requested feature by Premium Shoppartners: The feature that lets you create own categories and place different designs in different designer shops will be published soon. We’ll keep you up to date here and in the forum.

Due to the fact that there have been problems with PayPal orders in the past, we decided to test the differences with or without PayPal in the checkout over the past few weeks. Our results have shown that most of our customers simply choose another payment method when PayPal isn’t offered. Comparatively, more customers abandon their order when we offer PayPal. Obviously, this isn’t in our best interests and needs more investigation.
Since the amount of PayPal orders is less than 10% and, as mentioned above, customers use other payment methods when PayPal wasn’t offered, we decided to shut down PayPal for customers in the checkout today. This affects all markets except for Canada, Poland and the United States.

We’d love to add Paypal again, since we still believe in the simplicity and convenience of this payment method, and we also think that our customers should be able to use their preferred payment from a variety of options.

We will investigate this further, but I can’t give you a solid timeframe, as making changes in the checkout (the most sensitive area in eCommerce) are very time consuming processes. We’ll keep you posted here and in the forum.