Recasting web site content as online mini-stores
eLearningToys.com had $473,000 in online sales in 2004, its first full year–that’s with one URL. But with a total of 250 category-related domain names under ownership, founder Anne Yates is pondering a web strategy that would deploy products, product descriptions and images in product subcategories as independent stores, managing all of their e-commerce functions off one back end.
Yates, formerly a Nortel Networks programmer before launching eLearningToys in July 2003, is working with Stone Edge Technologies, the order management software provider for eLearningToys.com, to utilize a feature on the Stone Edge platform that allows retailers to create web sites on the fly based on their current inventory. “You can say that you want to create a site named this or that, put a logo up there, have store templates built in, push a button and there you go,” she says. “It all feeds right back into Stone Edge’s Order Manager, so you can manage hundreds of stores with one back end.”
Yates hopes to roll out some of her 250 toy-related domain names as subcategory-specific online stores that are also linked to the main site: a building blocks store, for example. The idea is not to try to build a brand with each subcategory site, but to build the brand of the main site as a gateway to the subsites. The marketing benefit to raising subcategories to the status of independent stores even though they also remain linked to the main site is that it gives search engines another way to find the products in addition to accessing them through the main site.
“Essentially, it brings subcategories up to a higher level,” says Yates. “If you have a store with 5,000 items, this says, let’s take the 100 items in this subcategory, call it a store and bring it up one level. So those items then become more important to the search engine.”
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