A2Z Stores LLC, a retail web site operator doing business as Pure Pearls, relaunched PurePearls.com last week on the open-source Magento Community Edition e-commerce platform, which it chose because it’s free to own and offers a flexible infrastructure on which to build, says Bruce Turner, the retailer’s CEO.
Among his immediate plans: building out a base of product videos that Pure Pearls, which sells jewelry, can feature on social networks and its own web site to improve conversion rates. Turner hopes to do all that while also avoiding the appearance of duplicate web content that can run afoul of search engine algorithms.
“Google wants unique content,” Turner says. “If you have duplicate content, it can hurt search engine rankings.”
Meantime, for all the flexibility Magento offers in building out PurePearls.com with new functionality, including an online customer rewards platform and product zoom, the Magento technology also came with a surprise: It automatically created pages for consumer product reviews that appeared like existing product pages, generating alerts from the retailer’s Google webmaster tool that it had duplicate content. Pure Pearls worked with its site design and development firm, Your Eyes Here, to ensure the new pages were configured so as not to appear as duplicate content.
To avoid duplication in its video content, Pure Pearls is working with its Invodo video management system to produce video content and distribute it to social networks such as YouTube and Facebook. Invodo produces the videos using product samples and descriptions received from Pure Pearls, and ensures that content sent to social networks differs enough from videos placed on PurePearls.com so as not to be seen as duplicate content by search engines, Turner says.
Video content on YouTube, for example, would likely include product retail pricing embedded in the video.
“We chose Invodo after first considering producing our own videos in house,” Turner says. “Careful research uncovered that it takes a huge amount of resources to produce hundreds of high-quality videos. We chose Invodo because they offer an affordable, all inclusive one-stop-shop approach that allowed us to focus on our core business while they focus on video production, delivery and distribution.”
At the same time, Invodo is providing a new version of its InPlayer video player, which is designed with minimal amount of Flash technology in favor of incorporating content code including HTML, Cascading Style Sheets and JavaScript. This configuration enables rapid customization of content and faster page loads, Invodo says.
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