Creating delivery methods

You must define at least one delivery method and its costs so that your customers will receive their orders. To do so, switch to the “Settings / Delivery and payment” menu. Create a new delivery method and specify a basis of calculation. You have a variety of options such as fixed price, number of products or value of shopping basket. If you want the system to calculate the shipping price based on the weight of products in the shopping basket, you must first ensure that you have set a per-unit weight for every product.

You can access the settings via “Complete”. Enter the costs for shipping here and switch the delivery method to “visible”.

Automated e-mails to customers

In your merchant back office, you can assign one of many status codes to every order placed in your shop. Status codes range from “Order seen” through “Paid” or “Ready to be shipped“ to “Delivered”. You can modify the status of any order by clicking on an order and then placing a check mark next to the current status.

These various status codes ensure that you always have an overview of orders which still require processing. These codes also serve as the basis for automatic e-mail notifications, which allow you to update your customers on the status of their orders.

If, for example, you specify an order’s status as “Processing”, then an e-mail is sent immediately to your customer—who will then see that their order will be delivered before long. Your customers will know that they are in good hands.

To activate automatic notifications and to tailor the corresponding e-mails to your preferences, click on “E-mail settings” in the “Settings” menu. On the “Events” tab, you can select the phases of an order which trigger automatic e-mails. Many more events—such as password changes or confirmations of dates—can be associated with automatic e-mail notifications. Use the Editor to adapt text for an e-mail.

Going live

You can now go live with your online shop. But first, activate your shop’s page cache to speed up surfing for your customers. To do so, either click on the red banner in the uppermost header of your back office or activate the page cache in the "Settings / General settings” menu. Afterwards, you can throw open the doors to your shop in the “Status” submenu.

By the way, it is better to be safe than sorry. Check for yourself that your shop is functioning properly. Make a small purchase in your own online shop and complete every step of an order. Do not forget to make an actual payment and to verify that the money does indeed end up in your account.

The back office

The merchant back office is the main switchboard of your online shop. From here, you always have a clear view of your inventory, orders, customers or the design of your online shop. Via the upper menu bar, you can switch between the individual areas from each item.

Under the "Settings/User management", you can modify the options for the administrator. For example, a new login password to the back office or the language used in the back office. In the "Settings/General settings" menu, you'll find a status overview of your online shop. Here, you can see (e.g., depending on rented ePages shop type) which features are available to you, how much of your webspace you have already used or how many of the maximum allowed payment methods you have already activated.

The setup wizard

The shop system will show you a setup wizard when you call up the back office for the first time. Using the wizard, you can make the initial preselection for your future design in just four steps and record the basic information, for example, your contact details or the tax ID number of your company. You can also use the setup wizard to roughly specify which content and sub-pages your online shop is going to have. Don't worry though, you can always change this later at any time via the "Settings/General settings" menu. And you can also call up the setup wizard again via the "Settings" menu at any time.

Convenience features

To the right in the back office, you will find an additional menu with many convenience features that can make working with the shop much easier. If it is hidden, you can expand it by simply clicking on the question mark icon.

In the expanded menu, context-sensitive online help will show you more detailed help topics from the user manual depending on which section you are in. This menu also provides you with links to videos, the ePages blog and a search function for the user manual. Located behind the second tab is your shop's very convenient tray. With it, you can transfer data from one area of the shop to another without having to enter it again. An example: Highlight a selection of products in the product overview. Via the drop-down menu in the product overview, you can now copy all selected product numbers into the tray. Now insert all products into the export list for a product portal of your selection with one click to boost your marketing activities. (You can find details about the product portals in the sixth article of this series titled "Marketing") On the third tab, you'll find the favourites function of your back office. Expand the tab and you can add every area of your back office where you are currently located to your favourites. This lets you navigate even more quickly through the areas that you need most often. The fourth tab of the convenience features contains the history. The most recent pages that you have called up in the back office are kept here. For example, you can use the history function in combination with the tray of your shop to transfer data from one area of your back office to another area even more quickly.

Preview function and page cache

At any time, you can switch from the back office to the so-called "Storefront" of your online shop and view it just as your customers will see it. This enables you to check which effect your changes have for your customers, for example, design changes or the product images. To do this, simply click on the preview button in the upper edge of your back office. The preview button always shows you the area of your storefront that you are currently actively editing in the back office.

Next to the preview button, you will find a note about the page cache of your online shop. What does this mean? With the page cache, you can optimise the display speed of your online shop for your customers. The page cache means that every page no longer has to be output again from the database. However, if you are still working on setting up your online shop, we recommend not yet activating the page cache. If you do though, you will have to manually activate the cache before each use of the preview function in order to be able to see the effects of your editing in the storefront.

Via the "Settings/General settings" menu, you can switch the page cache on and off and also specify the interval when the current version of the back office is to be automatically transferred to the database. You can also set the duration for how long the cache is to remain valid on the server before browser requests are again answered by the database.

One small note: The setting "Product detail view" contains the information about the current inventory status of the respective product. If you only have a few products in stock or you sell your products very quickly, you should set this to a short interval so that purchases won't occur when you are actually out of stock.
 

You have created texts in Microsoft Office for your online shop and inserted them in the right places in your back office? When you check the storefront, however, you notice that the same content is not visible to visitors? Don’t worry! This is not a system error. Read the ePages blog to learn the cause of this apparent bug—and learn how to prevent it from occurring.

It is one of the most common customer queries posed to the ePages Support Center: content inserted in the back office is not displayed in the storefront. Oddly enough, this issue happens only with Internet Explorer; all other browsers work flawlessly. What happened?

This “error” is a result of the interplay between Microsoft Word and Internet Explorer. More specifically, the problem occurs as follows. If you use MS Word to create and format texts, then this popular word-processing programme uses its own type of invisible formatting commands—to underline or boldface, for example. Although these commands are similar to HTML formatting commands (e.g. as they are used to display website content), the MS Word formatting commands are not compatible with Internet Explorer. If you copy the texts created and formatted in Word and use the editor to insert them into your shop, then all the formatting commands will be transferred and added in the editor—likewise invisibly. This then causes display errors in—of all browsers—Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

The solution to this problem

If the aforementioned display errors occur in Internet Explorer, please locate the corresponding page in your back office. Select the Data Sheet mode so that you can see the texts’ formatting commands. You can access Data Sheet mode via the General/Description tab. Delete the formatting commands which had been copied out of Microsoft Word. Then switch to the editor and graphically modify the texts in accordance with your preferences.

The ideal solution for creating content is to not copy text in MS Word and paste it directly into your editor. In other words, it is best to create and format content directly in your shop’s editor.

If you need to write a lot of text and thus prefer to use Microsoft Word, do not forget to delete all formatting commands prior to inserting content into your shop. A good way of doing this is to use the editor supplied with your operating system: Notepad (Microsoft Windows) or Textedit (Apple OS). Copy your content in MS Word and paste it into one of these two programmes. After insertion, highlight and copy the content anew—now devoid of unnecessary formatting—and paste it into your shop’s editor. You can now adapt the content to suit your graphics-related preferences.
 

In the first part of the article “B2B features of your ePages shop” we took a look at the possibilities how to make customers individual offerings by using your ePages online shop. The second part of the article deals with handling gross/net-VAT, how to make it easier for your business clients to set orders by using the order form and shopping lists and what you can do to connect your ePages shop to ERP and CRM software of your choice.

Gross/net – VAT in your ePages shop

Do you want to use gross- or net-prices? Or do you prefer to present net gross prices only to particular customers. Your ePages online shop gives you a choice of tax models.

To change the tax model for the whole shop, choose the „Settings/Tax calculation” menu item. Choose the “Tax model” tab.

If you wish to exclude particular customers from viewing/paying VAT, you can do this individually. Change to the “Customers/Customers” menu item and click on the desired customer number from the list. In the “General”-tab, click on the “Customer account” link. Here you will find the various business-oriented settings for the customer, including the choice of tax model, as described above.

Simplified ordering via order forms and shopping lists

Especially useful features for business customers are those that simplify ordering and re-ordering. Your shop has two features to assist with this.

Ordering via an order form:

There is a link to the standard order form from the “shopping basket overview with product line items box”. A simple link to the order form can also be assigned to any navigation bar in the “Design” menu. You can add up to 10 products into the order form by entering their product numbers and amounts.

If you want to add a separate link to the order form page, go to either the menu item “Quick design” or “Advanced design”. Click on the button to “Insert page element” at the desired location. In the resulting list, choose the “Shopping basket and order” group, and then the entry called “Link to order form”.

Ordering from shopping lists:

If your customer regularly re-orders the same group of products, he can do this with just a mouse-click, using shopping lists. To do this, he just needs to save an existing order  as a shopping list for later visits. This can be done directly from any basket page, or from the customer’s “My account” list of old orders. If, later, a re-order is necessary, he can click on the link to “Manage shopping lists” in his “My account” page, and re-order any shopping list. This allows bulk ordering with just a mouse click.

Connecting third-party systems via web services

Last but not least, we have designed new shop products especially for B2B online merchants, ePages Flex and ePages for SAP Business One.

With ePages Flex, you get an inexpensive rental shop on a virtual dedicated server, with activated web services. These web services allow you to connect any desired third-party systems to the ePages shop. Extend your shop functionality via a connection to a CRM system, an ERP system or any other financial system. With ePages Flex, it’s all possible.

Our second new product, ePages for SAP Business One, is aimed at companies using the SAP Business One ERP system, who want a simple and economical start in E-Commerce. The inexpensive rental shop is pre-configured with a connector to SAP Business One.

Do you want to know more about ePages Flex and ePAges for SAP Business One? Our sales team would be pleased to advise you at sales@epages.com or on the phone at +49-40-350 188-0

The most important features in your online shop for a B2B scenario are:

• Separating your customers into various customer groups – make special offers to various customer groups and individuals and make special shop features available to them.
• Handling of gross/net prices – define which tax model customers experience: whether they are presented gross-prices net-prices in your shop. Use different tax models for different markets.
• Simplified order process for returning customers – offer your regular customers the option of filling out order forms and using shopping lists to simplify order placement.
• Connection to other systems via web services – get to know our new shop products, ePages Flex and ePages for SAP Business One. Both support connecting business-management software to your online shop.

The login – sort your customers

When doing direct sales to end-users, it’s best not to limit access to your shop. But it is sometimes quite different in a Business to Business scenario. If you want to offer special prices to certain customer groups without making this public to everyone, it is better if the large customers and the small customers only see their own prices. To do this, you need to separate your customers as soon as they enter your shop.

Your ePages online shop provides several features to help you with this task. For example, if you want to make sure that only your known partners and customers can access your catalog, just limit shop-access to registered customers only. Anonymous visitors are not able to register themselves; they need to ask for an account via the contact page. The customer can only enter your shop after you have created an account for him in your shop back-office.

You can find the setting to block shop access for anonymous visitors in the menu item called „Settings/User management”. Choose the “Sign in” tab.

Another possibility is to allow potential customers access to the shop, but to allow only registered customers to create a shopping basket. You can find the necessary settings in the menu item called “Settings/Basket settings”.

If you allow baskets only for registered customers, visitors will be asked to register or log-in as soon as they try to place a product into the basket. Additionally, you have the option to block newly registered customers from ordering until you have given them permission to do so. You can read more details further down in this article.

In the „Registration“-tab, you can decide which data you want new customers to enter when they register at your shop for the first time, and which of those fields should be marked as “required”. Good to know: during the registration process, your customer’s VAT-ID number field will be checked for correct syntax and country of origin.

Customer groups, price lists and discounts – making individual offers

Offer your good customers and bulk purchasers discounts on their orders. Assign them to particular customer groups and offer them a variety of discounts, using price lists and discount schemes. In order to do this, proceed as follows:

To create a new customer group, choose the “Customers/Customer groups” menu item.

Create a new customer group, such as for regular customers. To assign a customer to this new group, choose the menu item called “Customers/Customers”. Click on the customer’s number in the list, and choose the “Customer account” link.

Now you can not only assign the customer to the customer group, but also – as mentioned above – decide whether you allow him to place orders. Further customer-specific features found here are the choice of tax model – whether to show gross- or net-prices to this customer, as well as adding an internal comment about the customer in the “Internal note” field. With the “Confirm now” button, you can also mark the customer account with a time-stamp which documents the last time you confirmed the accuracy of the account’s data. Note: the customer will not be informed of this action via E-Mail.

In order to set up price lists and discounts for the various customer groups, change to the „Products/Price lists” menu item. Here, you can add a new price list and its valid currency, as well as a time period for which the price list is valid. In the “Price lists/Advanced settings” page you can decide if you want to display the discount prices during each visitor’s whole visit to the shop, or to restrict display of special prices to the shopping basket. Be aware, though, that if you display discount prices everywhere, the performance of your shop will suffer.

Click on your new price list in order to change its parameters. Using the “Customer groups” tab, you can decide which groups should benefit from this price list’s discounts.

If you want to make the price list valid only for certain individual customers, you can use the „Customers“ tab. Be aware that each customer group and each individual customer can only be assigned to one price list.

Now you can click on the “Shopping basket discount” tab to define a minimum basket-price threshold as well as a general discount on the basket. You can choose between a percentage-discount or a fixed price (“Absolute value”) discount. The “Minimum amount” defines the minimum price of the basket needed before the discount takes effect.

It is also possible to create discounts for individual products, by assigning your price list to each desired product individually and then defining a special discount or set of scale-prices per product. To do this, choose the “Products/Products” menu item. Choose the product code for which you want to assign a discount, and then click on its “Prices” tab.

You can choose between “Bulk discount” and “Value discount”: you can either define discounts dependent on the amount of ordered products, or use a price threshold to define when the discount takes effect. For both types of discount, you can assign one or more price lists, each with its own discounts for that product.

Read  in the second part of the article how to handle with Gross/net-VAT in your ePages shop and how to make it even more comfortable for your business clients to set orders by using the order form and shopping lists.
 

Every incoming shop order can be assigned various status-settings using the merchant back-office. The possibilities range from “order viewed” and “ready for dispatch” to “dispatched”. You can change the status of every order by clicking on the order number and then simply clicking on the desired status fields in the following order-editor page.

Alternatively, you can modify the status of a whole list of orders in one go. Simply list the desired orders using the Order Search mask or the Inbox page, click the checkboxes of those orders that should all get the same status change, and then choose the desired “Set status to…” field in the drop-down menu. Finally, save the status-change by clicking on the “Execute” button. The large collection of status fields can provide you the overview you need to keep ahead of your incoming orders. At the same time, the status settings can act as triggers for automatically generating Emails, informing your customers about the progress of their orders. For example, if you set the status of an order to “in process”, your customer can immediately be informed by Email that he will not have to wait much longer for his order to arrive. He will feel well-taken-care-of.

In order to activate and customize the related Emails, click on the “Email settings” entry in the “Settings” menu. In the following “General” tab, you can set up your standard Email signature – your name and address found at the bottom of every Email. You can mark-up your text (boldfacing, underlining coloring, etc.) and even include your shop logo or other images, using the “Edit text” visual editor. In order to activate the automatically generated Emails, and to customize their contents, click on the “Events” tab.

In the following 3-column event-list, you can decide which order-status-changes should trigger an automatic Email to your customers. Many other events, such as customer password-changes or appointment-confirmations can also trigger automatic Emails. Simply click the corresponding checkbox in the right-hand column, and then save your changes. Attention: The two additional text fields will be added to the standard Email content, such as the order details. The “Header” will be placed above the standard content, and the “Text” will be added below it. The standard content itself is not editable.

In principle, we recommend that you use the input masks of your back office for entering, modifying and deleting data. This method reduces the possible sources of error and ensures a unified data structure. In certain circumstances, however, you may need to edit data manually. We dealt with just such an example recently in the ePages blog. In these and similar cases, it makes sense to employ the import/export function of ePages. Only when you have 20 or more products to edit do we recommend using the import/export function. Here, you should adhere to certain rules to prevent sources of error.

Exporting data

You can find the import/export function at different locations in your merchant back office: You can find it under the "Customers", "Products" as well under the "Content/Category" menu items.
 

There's not much difference from which menu item you use to switch to the import/export function. In the different tabs that appear for the function, you always have the option of changing the object type again:

You can edit four different object types with the import/export function.

• Products: All information about the individual products (product names, prices, shipping methods, etc.)
• Content/Categories/Pages: All information about the individual pages of your shop with the exception of the product pages (descriptions, keywords, higher-ranking categories, etc.)
• Category-Product assignment: Product numbers and higher-ranking categories
• Customers: All information about your customers (names, addresses, e-mails, etc.)

Select the object type that you would like to export. Clicking on "Export" will generate a CSV file with the selected data.

The formatting options "German/Germany" or "English/United Kingdom" arranges the data according to the country-specific format (e.g. date and time of day). The standard coding according to ISO-8859-1 does not contain any special characters like @, £, ™ or ©. If you would like to use these, select the UTF-8 formatting. The semicolon should be used separator. Since the comma is often used in product texts, there are more often problems with further editing in table programs as a result.

Important information about exporting: When exporting, the data from your shop is only copied. It is not deleted from the database. Your shop is still fully functional after an export.

Further editing in the table program

Save the generated CSV file on your computer. Create a backup copy and then import this to your table program. (You should avoid using a double-click to open the file. Instead use the import function of your table program to prevent errors. When importing, observe that the data is formatted correctly (separators, coding, etc.)

The CSV files are always structured the same, independently from the selected object type. You'll find the headings for the individual elements in the first row. The actual content follows starting with the second row. The following applies: One complete row is used per object (customer, product, etc.).

You must observe two rules when editing the CSV files in order to subsequently be able to use the import function:

1. Never modify the headings in the first row.
2. Do not change the order of the individual columns.

Complete or adapt the content of the CSV file to your wishes and import the file again into your shop system. To do this, proceed as follows:

Import the data into ePages

Save the CSV file. When doing so, observe that you select the semicolon as separator and select the coding according to the contents of the file. If you have used special characters, you must use the UTF-8 coding.

After saving in the table editing program, you need to upload the CSV file to your shop again via your shop's import/export form. When doing so, observe that you carry out settings for formatting and separating accordingly and that you assign the correct object type.

Click on "Search" and select the CSV file that you want to upload. Click on "Import" to start the upload.

Important: The import of data is additive. That means that the content of the CSV file of your database is either added (e.g. new products) or overwritten with new values (e.g. additional or modified information to already existing products). Completely deleting via the import function is not possible!

Two examples: If you have deleted a complete line to a product in the CSV file, this does not mean that the product will be removed from your shop when you import. If you want to delete it, you need to use the merchant back office.

This is also the case for empty cells that normally contain information. If you have completely deleted the contents of a cell for an existing product, e.g. deleted the descriptive text, this product description will not be deleted (i.e. replaced by empty lines) in the database when you import.
 

To find additional information on this vast topic, feel free to read the three preceding articles “Part I: A Forest Full of Trees”, Part II: The Agony of Choosing”, Part III: When gremlins strike”

Do you find our video tutorials useful? Then take a look at the tutorial-section on our website to find additional ones on a variety of subjects helping you to maintain and use your ePages onlineshop.

Video 1: General Setting and Paypal

Video 2: Setting up PayPal Pro

Video 3: Setting up PayPal Express in ePages

Video 4: Setting up Moneybookers in ePages 

Despite interactive wizards in the merchant back office, many errors can still happen when setting up the payment process in your shop. The third part of our series "Payment systems in online shops" shows you how you can prevent these, what to do when you are stuck and how to get faster answers for support requests.

The devil is in the details: A good portion of the ePages support requests are the result of typos when entering the payment user data in the merchant back office. Even if it seems self-evident, here are four tips that in our experience can solve up to 70 percent of all arising problems:

1. Make sure you enter the registration data for your payment provider correctly and completely in the merchant back office. The data is sometimes longer than the visible output field on the side of the payment provider. In this case, be sure that you have really transferred the full data with all parameters.
2. Pay attention to the correct use of upper and lower case.
3. Be sure that you have not mixed up "username" and "password" login fields.
4. Look again at the payment provider in your dealer account and make sure the payment process that you have selected in your shop is also actually enabled
    

If you have entered all the data of your payment supplier correctly, it’s time to test the payment. Almost all payment suppliers offer a "sandbox" test mode for this. The "sandbox" allows you to process testtransactions without consequences. So…

Let’s go to the sandbox!

You can find the function for activating the test mode in the "Settings" tab of the selected payment type. Even here, there can be errors waiting along the path to enabling your selected payment method. They arise through different approaches the providers use for handling the test mode.

The optional test: Most payment providers offer an optional test. That means that a test transaction can be performed with the merchant data. But this is not a requirement for the final enabling of the account.

The obligatory test: Several providers such as HSBC have a sandbox requirement. The merchant has to have successfully used the test mode one time in order for a payment account to be enabled. The help texts in your ePages shop will provide you with information about the respective procedure of the individual payment provider.

PayPal, the special case: With PayPal, the test works differently. Although the payment service provider from eBay does offer a sandbox, a test account must be created for this. If you have a merchant account at PayPal, this will not work in the test mode. You can apply for a PayPal sandbox account here: http://developer.paypal.com/

Once you have performed a test purchase, it’s time for a live test.

The live test

A requirement of a live test is that your ePages online shop is "open".

To do this, click in the "Settings" menu and select "General settings". You can find the "Status" submenu item under the "Status" tab. You can go live with your shop here. But take note! The moment you go live, the shop can be reached by everyone.

To prevent unwanted orders from happening, we recommend when setting up your shop for the first time that you initially create the payment system and then test the payment function with a single, inexpensive test product and only then entering in the actual products.

But what can you do when the shop is already running and you want to expand or replace your payments? In this case, withhold the new payment method from your customers until you have tested it yourself. To do this, proceed as follows:

Select the "Customer groups" item in the customers menu. Now create a new customer group in the menu that appears. Name it "Test customer", for example.

Now switch to the storefront and register as a new customer in your shop. After the registration process, switch to the back office again.

You can assign this to different groups in the "Customers" menu. Click on the newly created customer entry and then on the "Customer account" submenu on the "General" tab. Assign the newly created customer to the "Test customer" customer group.

After you have created a new test customer, ensure that the new payment method is also only available to this one. Click on the "Shipping and payment" item in the "Settings" menu. Then switch to the "Payment methods" tab. Select the newly created payment method by clicking on this.

Under the "Customer groups" tab, you can set which payment methods are available to which customers. Select "Test customer" and save the setting.

Now the road is clear for a test purchase with the new payment type. Switch this to "visible" in the payment methods menu and start your purchase. The new payment method is only shown in the shopping basket to the newly created test customer.

After you have made a successful live purchase, you can lift the payment method restriction and offer it to all customers. In certain circumstances, you may still have to create information texts for this new payment type under the "General" payment method.

Handling errors

Sometimes everything doesn’t always work right during the first start-up. In this case, it’s time to take advantage of support. To help get the right solution quickly, it’s important for you to gather as much information as possible. In addition to the selected payment, this also includes most importantly the following:

1. The exact error message: Make note of the error message. Copy it into a text document using copy & paste. The trained support personnel are often able to immediately determine where exactly the error is using the information in the error message.
2. Date and time of the transaction which led to the error message: If support cannot determine where the error is using the error message information, they will have to look in the log file to see exactly what went wrong with the transaction. The precise date and time information will help them with the search.

Support

If you want to contact the ePages support when you have difficulties with the payment, this is facilitated much more quickly if you contact support via e-mail and by telephone. The reason for this is simple: Since your support person often needs to work together with the corresponding payment provider, the error can usually not be solved directly during a telephone call. In this case, your ePages support person is reliant on the exact documentation of the error which you can best supply via e-mail.

Also important for support questions: Identifying the right contact person. If you can clearly see that the error message was issued by the payment provider then their support is the best contact for you. If the message comes from the shop software, then you should contact ePages support.

In the closing section of our "Payment systems in online shops" we show you four examples in detail for integrating the most varied payment providers into your shop. You can find the article here.

Your online shop and each of its categories and product pages has its own address, the so-called URL. The browser uses this to identify and locate the individual pages of your online shop. The URL also shows the browser where the contents of the pages to be displayed are located. As Internet user, you see the URL in the address line of your browser, for example.

Let’s assume your customer is currently located in the shoes category of your shop. The corresponding URL of your shop would then have looked something like this up to now:

With the new short URLs, you can now give these categories an address that’s easier to read. e.g.: http://www.epagesdemo.de/Shoes.

What do short URLs do?

You can use the new short URLs to present self-explanatory and easy-to-understand links to your customers.

An example: You are starting a special 10 % discount for customers who make a repeat purchase. You set up a special page, which gives your customers all the details about the sale. You can now give this page a short URL like www.epagesdemo.com/existing-customer-rebate and promote this address on all invoices, enclosed flyers or by using a newsletter campaign.

Short URLs are also practical as "meaningful address" in the scope of an Adword campaign. You can transport an additional message or offer with the linked landing page of the Adword advertisement, for example. Here’s another example: www.epagesdemo.com/SPECIAL-SALE-Dell-Laptops

Short and succinct URLs also have a positive effect on the conversion rate and thus the success of the positioning of your shop in the Google search results. A short and simply formulated, descriptive short URL will more likely be clicked on by users than a cryptic, long URL with incomprehensible database parameters.

Good	Bad

Activating the short URL in ePages

After your hosting provider has deployed version 6.0.6, you will be queried automatically as to whether you want to activate the "Short URLs" feature the next time you log in to the Merchant Back Office. You confirm this. The system now creates a unique short URL for every page. The naming of the short URL is based on the content of the respectively created titles for homepage, categories and product pages.

Adapting short URLs in ePages

After the "Short URL" feature has been activated, you now have the option of editing the individual address pages. This may be necessary if, for reasons of search engine optimisation, you want to work with the full length of 60 characters for the page titles. (See also the three-part article "Selling with just a few words – Designing Google search results"). Thus, relatively long URLs sometimes arise such as http://www.my-t-shirt-store.com/cotton-t-shirt-with-v-neck-and-tiger-print. Consider whether this URL is too long and adapt it accordingly. But when doing so, observe point 4 of the important information on short URLs below.
 

To do this, either click in the menu on "Content/Categories" and select "Datasheet view", if you would like to modify the URL of a category or a page, or click in the main menu on "Products" and select the product whose short URL you want to adapt.

On the "General" tab in the "Settings" submenu of the respective category, you will now find the short URL currently selected by the system. By clicking on "Edit" you can now adapt this to your liking. Please make sure that the short URL you have chosen is as self-explanatory as possible without being too long. After you have clicked on "Save", the respective page can now be reached by your customers under the short URL.

Proceed accordingly for products. You can find the input field for changing the short URLs that were automatically suggested by the system on the "General" tab of the respective product under the "Price/Stock/Shipping" section

Important information about short URLs