Multi-Store Internet Retailing

Multi-Store Internet Retailing
Multi-store Internet Retailing is something I've done for years and is achieved by building multiple niche sites. There are many advantages to building and maintaining multiple stores. In this post I will explain the advantages I have realized as well as techniques that helped make my sites successful.

Advantages
SEO
Multi-store Internet Retailing and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is all about the keywords (or key phrases). For example, let's say you sell all brands and types of shoes and have a domain great name with the keyword shoes in it. Typically you will have links to your site with the keyword shoes, and keyword dense pages as well. This is all good and I wouldn't recommend changing this. You've got the keyword shoes locked down, you've got good ranking and get a lot of traffic and sales.

What about brand names though? If you build pages with keyword dense content, URL's, etc for Brand A, Brand B, Brand C, etc... shoes you will probably increase your ranking for keyword searches but at the same time you may be diluting the focus of your site. Instead, you could build an entire site just focusing on Brand A shoes, all your pages and links would be based on Brand A shoes. From my experience, it's a better way to get ranking for a particular key phrase.

Usability
From a usability standpoint multiple stores/sites are great because they are focused in on what the customer is looking for. If they came to your site because they were searching for Brand A shoes, they won't be confused when navigating your site and search results because everything will be focused in on the one specific brand.

Advertising
Because you have multiple niche sites you have a lot more banner space available. Let's take the example of the all encompassing shoe site and banners. If Brand A comes out with something new it would be great to promote this new product with a banner on your site. The problem with the all encompassing site is that many brands are coming out with new products at the same time and each of them is only a small percentage of your customers. The niche brand site allows you to provide advertising centric to your customers. This aspect of advertising is even more beneficial for your newsletter and is appropriate for all of you're sites advertising.

SERPS
Because of your keyword dense site and links you're SERPS (Search Engine Results Page) should rank high for the site specific keywords because everything you are exposing to search engines has a very narrow focus. Granted you still need quality content and links but assuming you are not trying to spam the search engines you should be fine.

Testing
Having multiple websites allow you to test different things on different websites to determine the best return while minimizing negative impact. For instance, let's say you read an article about the benefits of pop-up ads on your website but you're leery that it may end up turning away most of your customers. Since you have multiple websites you can take one of your less popular websites and evaluate the return you get from the pop-up ads and at the same time minimize the negative impact you will receive by customers leaving your website because you are annoying them.

Another interesting concept is the ability to assign different prices for the same product on a different website. This would allow you to determine the all too hard to find price point that maximizes the markup without being too high to reduce the number of sales you make. This is probably better used as a short term test as customers may not be happy that you charge a higher price on one of your websites while still being the same company. Including services, shipping, etc, can help differentiate the product enough to justify the higher price.

Techniques
Brand/Type/Customer
Deciding how to break up your products into different stores should be based on your products and key phrase research. In the examples above I based stores on they're brand and I've had personal success in doing that. I've also had success building stores based on product types. For the shoes example you could build sites with key phrases focus on types such as sneakers, dress shoes, high heel shoes, sandals, etc... Additionally you may want to explore different sites based on your customers, age, ethnic, geographic location, gender. For instance you could make two sandal sites, one for males and one for females or one for customers under 30 and one for customers over 30.

Website Code
I have my products linked to categories and manufactures in the same database. By adding a site table and some menu tables I can construct links to products that I want to display on particular sites based on the domain name. Since my domain name is always unique and since it's trivial to read the domain name during page loads it makes the website code and database design straight forward. All of this means that I can create and maintain a "framework" that all the sites use. Instead of having to build and maintain a separate code base for each site, all the sites use the same code base but what is rendered in the pages is based on the domain name in the address line. This saves an enormous amount of time and money.

Unique looking sites
What prevents all my sites from looking the same you might ask. Obviously you will want to have a unique site banner (usually on the top of the page). In addition to the site banner is the cleaver use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Used correctly you can make two sites look completely different without changing any of the back end website coding. On a side note, changing CSS is a quick way to give your site a face lift. So how do you dynamically assign CSS to multiple sites within the same code base? With ASP.NET you can assign each page a "theme". You can do this dynamically by using the following code:

Protected Sub Page_PreInit(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.PreInit

Page.Theme = [Function that returns the theme name from the database based on the domain name in the address line]

End Sub

Then in the code base directory on your web server (Lets say C:InetPubMultiStoreWebsite) you would add an App_Themes folder, and a sub folder for each theme. The name of the theme folders should be the same name you assigned in the "Page.Theme = " code listed above. i.e. MyCoolDomain1Theme, MyCoolDomain2Theme, MyCoolDomain3Theme.

SSL Checkout
Won't it be expensive to purchase web certs for each website? It would be if you did but typically when you are ready to checkout you will be redirected to some type of a secure checkout. In most cases when you have many different sites setup you will redirect to a single secure checkout domain. This might sound fishy when reading this but when you see how many sites are doing this you will realize that it happens more often than you realize. The key is that customers are not going to pay much attention to a long address line that means very little to them. The trick is making them feel comfortable; you can do this by making sure you use the same site banner and CSS in your secure checkout as you do with the site they were redirected from. This can be tricky because the non-secure website, lets say MyCoolDomain1.com, MyCoolDomain2.com, MyCoolDomain3.com determines its site banner and what CSS "theme" to use based on the domain name in the address line. Now that you've redirec ted to all those sites to MySecureCheckoutDomain.com to process payments with your SSL Cert, you need to pass the site id across the address line so the secure checkout site knows which banner and CSS to use.

Problems
Search Engine Spam
The techniques in this post are not meant to be a template to build websites fast and easy in an attempt to spam the search engines. This has been done many times over and you won't get any lasting benefit. Even if spamming the search engines is not your intent it can appear that way to the search engines and if you're a legitimate Internet retailer I'm sure that's the last thing you want. Don't for instance create more that one website dedicated to Brand A shoes, Do create a website dedicated to Brand A sneakers and another one dedicated to Brand A sandals. There will always be some overlap of products between websites but try to minimize that as much as possible and make sure you design unique pages of written content and product groupings for each site.