Another busy week on the way! We have finally integrated with Channel Advisor which means that our products are now viewable on some of the biggest price comparison engines, such as Nextag, Price Grabber, Shopzilla, and Google shopping. We were always on Google shopping but now the feed is listed by size which should help to increase our products’ visibility.

Graphics – The Christams graphics have been approved, so its just acase of uploading the final images and hotspotting to the various collections we have. We also have a bank of images that the affiliates can use on their websites, these are downloadable with embedded links from either Affiilaite Future or Linkshare.

Spring Summer Planning – Its been tough planning the Spring because Autumn has been so successful. But we’ve got to do it, well in we’ve done most of it, but when the website is trading at 100% on last year it makes it very difficult to be bold enough to think that that can continue! Anyway we have to get our heads around it this week and bulk up some of the buys where we can. We also have a few new brands where we have to plan the orders.

New Brands – Last week saw the launch of two new brands on Shoes.co.uk! Irregular Choice Shoes came in at the start of last week and have taken off like a bomb so we need to plan the repeats and have already bought a Spring range. The Winter range is a fabulous collection of party shoes and boots and many of them match the deatils on the Irregular Choice Bags that we already stock. So if you are looking for a Christmas present for loved one then take a look!
Ben Sherman Men’s Shoes also just came in with more styles to arrive this week. This is areally strond collection of desert boots and shoes.

Friday – sees me driving off down to Lutterworth for a meeting of the Enterpreneurs Circle, this is a monthly event where like minded buisness owners can all get together and learn a thing or two from Nigel Botterill, the guy that set up the ‘The Best of’ franchise. Nigel is a pretty successful entrepreneur so its time well spent. Time working on my business intead of in my business.

I am sure that there will be many other things to contend with! we still haven’t got the Postcoder system working, so hope fully I can get that boxed off as well, and we have a lot of work to do on SEO, removing some rogue duplicate content that seems to have found its wasy into the code after we introduced the departmental structure in July!
Have a great week!

Nigel

Well I’m no novice at HTML but I would have thought by now that modifying the themes in WordPress would be much much easier. It seems that every time you want to change anything you have to have a huge knowledge of CSS style sheets and php. Why can’t someone come up with an easy, customisable theme where all the modifications are clearly available from the dashboard? Is that just too much to ask?

Channel Advisor

Anyway what does the week ahead look like? We are have nearly completed the Channel Advisor integration, www.channeladvisor.co.uk which means that instead of us producing a unique feed for easch of the shopping comparison sites such as Nextag or Google Base we now send a feed which is unpdated daily, to Channel Advisor. The output is then configured for each of the shopping sites depending on their categories and other requirements. This means that our feed can be in many places all at once. It is always current and the title of each of the styles we sell can include the specific size that is available. This should lead to fewer wasted clicks as customers can click through by size instead of style and hopfully an increase in ROI.

We are integrating with a service called ‘Poscoder’ from World Addresses so that when customers come to register on the way to checkout, or need to add a delivery address, the post code can be entered and they can choose from the drop down addresses. This hopefully will lead to fewer lost orders because an address has been typed in incorrectly. This integration has been dragging on for a few weeks because of issues theor code has with IE 7 and above ie it does not work, but with a few tweaks this week it should all be up and running by Wednesday.

We have more deliveries of Fly London Boots coming in this week, most notably more deliveries of the best sellers such as Mol and Mes, but also Cher which is a new high leg boot on a high wedge unit. Fly London Boots have been selling extremely well so all deliveries from them are welcome!

We bought tons of these with straps and buckles and they are selling like hot cakes! we have more pruple coming in next week, this sold out first but there are still good stocks of black patent and black leather, Oh and Jackie bought some black suede Lelli Kelly Boots last week as well!

We took on two new staff at the beginning of October and I have just talked them in to having their photographs taken! Will Davies is Operations Assistant, he will help me with PPC, SEO and other ventures as well as stepping in to help with Customer Service when things get busy, (as they are !!!) and Sarah Lloyd has stepped in to fill Suzy’s boots, as customer service queen so good luck to both of them. Its really busy as we enter the Christmas period so I have my fingers crossed for them!

Congratulations Suzy!

Suzy left on the 26th October to have her baby, something that she did a week last Thursday! 29th Just in time eh Suzy!?  So ***Congrtulations Suzy!** Baby Oscar was born on the 29th October and weighed 8 lbs!

Suzy's Baby Oscar

Well its just that!, we have extended our returns period to Jan 15 to allow for people buying Christmas presents!

Have a Great Week!