eCommerce Checklist: 301 Redirects

From over 1,300 successfully launched projects, we’ve learned that the more prepared you are for a project, the less surprises, change orders and delays there are. If you are planning to launch an eCommerce business or add eCommerce to your business offerings, you may be overwhelmed wondering what needs to be accomplished ahead of development and taking a site live. Clarity has put our experience and expertise into this helpful checklist that will guide you to a smooth launch.

• Decide how you will calculate sales tax and supply your developer with any relevant account information
• Set up carrier accounts and share with development team
• Define your shipping process, both existing and desired
• For international shipping, determine customs, VAT, duties
• Prepare product dimensional weight information
• Register and configure merchant account(s)
• Choose the PCI DDS level of validation that is right for you and begin the certification process
• Follow the PCI Compliance guide to get certified
• Set up an automated certification audit
• Define inventory management rules

• Gather, optimize and organize images, product descriptions, marketing materials, etc.
• Plan and execute your content audit based on an updated target audience list
• Optimize existing metatags and metadata with adherence to the latest SEO best practices
• Plan SEO metadata for new pages & products (title, URL, Description, keywords, H1, H2’s)
• Create a spreadsheet with all of the pages that will be redirected and the pages they will redirect to
• Decide what account information to transfer and transfer method with your development partner
• Define customer specific, default and partner pricing
• Define account credit rules

There are different classes of sales tax that will need to be applied that can change based on county, zip code, or state depending on the locality and regulations for online business sales.

There can be major penalties for errors in collecting sales tax that can really hurt your business, so it is crucial to plan ahead for how you will ensure you are applying, collecting and reporting correctly.

Sales Tax To-do:

• Decide how you will calculate sales tax and supply your developer with any relevant account information

Merchant Account Needs

Many options for payment processing including: Standard credit cards, eCheck, PO, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Checkout and many more. If you don’t have a merchant account for credit card processing, note that it can take weeks to get approved. Begin this process early! The merchant takes on the risk of processing fraudulent charges, so the evaluation process can be lengthy. Talk to your developer. Clarity is a certified partner for many payment processors and helps its clients get signed up quickly and easily.

Some solutions, like Clarity eCommerce, will allow your customers to store their credit cards in a PCI DSS compliant wallet for later use during checkout.

Best Practices and Considerations

• If you accept any cards of a particular brand you must accept all cards from that brand equally
• You cannot establish a minimum or a maximum for card purchases
• You cannot impose a surcharge or fee for card payments separate from cash or check but you can give a discount for paying in cash or check
• You cannot establish special conditions for accepting cards
• You can impose a convenience fee for certain payment channels
• You cannot ask for personal information unless instructed by the Authorization Center

Which One to Choose?

SSL Certification allows the customer’s browser to securely connect to the web server. This is a crucial certification for eCommerce sellers, and there are a few different levels you can get certified for.

SSL Certificate To-do:

• Choose the validation that is right for you and begin the certification process

Is There a Difference? Yes, there are a few. Mostly it comes down to depth of validation and the level of trust you want visitors to feel. You also need that little “lock” icon, and the HTTPS in the URL. There are three types of certificates that offer differing levels of user trust for SSL/TLS negotiations: Domain Validated certificates (DV), Organization Validated certificate (OV) and Extended Validation certificates (EV).

You Don't Store Credit Card Numbers

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of requirements designed to ensure that companies that process, store, or transmit credit card information maintain a secure environment.

PCI DSS Certification To-dos:

• Similar to SSL Certification, you will need to choose the validation that is right for you and begin the certification process
• Set up an automated certification audit tool

PCI Compliance Requirements

• Install and maintain a firewall configuration to protect cardholder data
• Do not use vendor-supplied defaults for passwords and other security parameters
• Protect stored cardholder data (use PCI tokenization)
• Encrypt transmission of cardholder data across open, public networks
• Use and regularly update anti-virus sofware or programs

• Develop and maintain secure systems and applications
• Restrict access to cardholder data by business need to know
• Assign a unique ID to each person with computer access
• Restrict physical access to cardholder data
• Track and monitor all access to network resources and cardholder data
• Regularly test security systems and processes
• Maintain a policy that addresses information security for all personnel

Custom Content Strategies

Even if you are having a development company build your site, you will still need to provide much of the content. An SEO content strategy could take months to research and perfect, and I'm assuming that I've got about 3 minutes of your time, so I'll be brief. When writing for SEO, our target audience is mostly Google. Google is the most restrictive (except for keyword stuffing penalties that Bing does), so if we optimize our content within the Google guidelines, we'll do well across all the search crawlers. One caveat is that if you focus heavily on business management as your audience, Bing has a higher percentage of executives using it, so your display ads, PPC, etc. may be better focused on Bing, rather than Google.

If you understand how the search crawlers index content, then it helps in your content preparation. Remember that they don't just index websites. They index content.

Well, it doesn't rank an entire site. It may rank a single article or blog post really well for a single keyword. So before you start writing or re-writing any content, get your master competitive keyword list researched and approved. There is a 3-30-3 rule for improving CRO that content strategists typically implement.

Content Strategy To-do:

• Gather and organize images, product descriptions, marketing materials, etc.
• Plan and execute your content audit based on updated target audience list
• Optimize existing metadata with adherence to the latest SEO best practices
• Plan metadata for new pages

Both an SEO & CRO Tool

Over the years, as people became more familiar with the benefits Types of Redirects and need for organic SEO, they’ve started to roll out new mobile responsive, highly optimized websites. One of the main things that is updated on a website refresh is the re-working of the page URLs to make them more SEO friendly (i.e. it helps to improve a page’s rank with Google). Now, you could go into webmaster tools and flush your old site’s indexed pages (to remove 404’s when people try to hit the old pages), and force Google to crawl and index your new site, however, any SEO ranking authority that you’ve built up over time would all be flushed away.

301 redirects allow websites to tell the search bots that we’ve permanently moved a web page to a new URL, and if we use a 301 (permanent) re-direct, Google will transfer 90-99% of the link equity earned to the new page. As the the new page is recrawled, the authority may change for the better, especially if we not only created a better URL, but improved the other on-page ranking factors (H1, H2’s, meta description, meta title, keyword variations, mobile responsiveness, image factors, etc.).

<rule name="Blog203">
<match url="^blog/article/982/dnn-portalsintranets-made-easy$" />
<action type="Redirect" url="/blog/dnnportals-intranets-made-easy" redirectType="Permanent" />
</rule>

Types of Redirects

• 301: Moved permanently. Recommended for SEO
• 302: Found, but moved temporarily for HTTP 1.0 (Don't index)
• 307: Same as 302 but for HTTP 1.1 only

You can see in the example, that the old URL had position 2 of “/blog” but then added a position 3 (/article) and position 4 (982), before it finally listed the SEO friendly content in position 5. When we released our new site, we re-did all of the URLs to put the article names in position 3, a much stronger position for SEO, and removed the extraneous parts of the URL, that were actually hurting our rankings.

This is an example of a single redirect, but you can have more global redirects that would redirect a whole section (/products 42654/faucets/moen/*) to a more highly ranked and readable section (/faucets/moen/*) or even just (/moen/*).

301 Redirect To-do:

• Create a spreadsheet listing all of the pages that will be redirected and the corresponding pages they will be redirected to

If you have an existing eCommerce platform, there will be users accounts already setup that you will want to import to the new system. Make plans with your development partner for obtaining the necessary information and bringing it over to the new implementation.

User Account To-do:

• Decide what account information / role(s) needs to transfer and plan transfer method with your development partner

Be sure to set up all related accounts for shipping, accounting, payment processing, etc. ahead of launch and provide access to your eCommerce development partner.

You can plan to send an automated email to existing accounts so that your customers are notified of the coming change along with any information you want to include regarding benefits of the new site, the need to register a new password, etc.

If existing user accounts contain order history, address information, customer profiles, etc. that need to be brought over into the new system and the data isn’t going to sync from an ERP, CRM or other line of business application, plan with your development partner to pull the information from the existing platform.

Business logic helps define and set the parameters for how your online business will work. Lay these plans out ahead of time so that you can be sure the platform you choose can accommodate your needs.

Mapping out these types of business rules ahead of time will help ensure your project doesn’t hit any snags. If you are working with a development company, be sure to present these up front.

Business Logic & Rules To-dos:

• Define customer specific, default and partner pricing
• Define account credit rules
• Define inventory management rules

Customer Specific Pricing: If your pricing varies for items for any reason, you need to have the logic planned out ahead of time. Default pricing is set which will apply to all users who do not have specific pricing set. Volume discounts may still be applied to these accounts. Customer specific or partner pricing may be entered manually, pulled from your ERP, or determined by specific factors built in to an algorithm.

Account Credit Rules: Do new accounts need to complete a credit check before making their first purchase? Do certain accounts have limitations on what they can buy based on their credit? Do you want items of a certain cost to require payment?

Inventory Management Rules: Some products cannot be sold beyond inventory, while others can be backordered. Make sure the platform allows you to track inventory or not, in the case of digital products, allow back orders, manage real-time inventory stock, multi-warehouse inventory, drop-shipping through vendors and more. Clarity eCommerce (shown) allows for this and much more.

Clarity Ventures eCommerce Experts

If you are a business, ready to move forward with your eCommerce project, please give us a call or visit our website.

• Be Prepared for Your eCommerce Project
• When and How to Use 301 Redirects
• eCommerce User and Merchant Account
• Processing Sales Tax for eCommerce
• eCommerce Shipping Policies and Processing
• eCommerce Payment Processing and Providers
• Business-to-Business Sales Tax
• Auction Types
• eCommerce Secure Socket Layer Certifications
• PCI DSS Compliant eCommerce Checklist
• Split Shipping
• Search Engine & Conversion Rate Optimization
• eCommerce Business Logic and Rules