5 lesser-known features of DotGO’s ecommerce system

Recommend Other Items

Whenever you shop on Amazon, you will see, sitting beneath the item you are ordering, a list of other items that its algorithm has decided you might also wish to purchase. Now, we don’t have the same level of deeply complex coding as those guys, just like how our boss doesn’t have a net worth larger than the entire GDP of Kenya. However, our ecommerce system allows you, the website owner, to essentially take the role of the Amazon algorithm.

Of course, you can’t accurately determine the personal tastes of every user who buys from your ecommerce website. You can’t, like Amazon, tailor your item recommendations to the user, but you can tailor your recommendations to the item that the user is buying. For instance, if someone was buying a "Red Dress", you could use the Might Also Like section to select some shoes that would go perfectly with the dress. That item will then present itself to the customer when they click on the "Red Dress".

SEO for Items, Groups and Categories

Every item is a webpage in its own right. The same is the case with every group of items and every category, if your shop is a large one. And as you may not know, every item, group and category, has a dedicated SEO section at the bottom of its page. In here, you can give the page a specific title that clearly tells Google about what this page is about, as well as a unique page URL slug.

Of course, if you leave this blank, the system fills this out automatically with the name given to the item/group/category at the top, but doing this for every item could mean you miss out on some serious traffic. Imagine you had 80 items and 10 groups. It would be a bit of work, granted, but if you were to optimise every item and every group with its own carefully considered Google title and slug, your website will look much more professional and climb higher on Google’s search engine rankings.

If you don’t know about what SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) means, read our article dedicated to the subject.

Digital Downloads

A relatively new feature, Digital Downloads enables you to attach crucial pieces of digital information to any item in your website. This could be a PDF containing instructions, a Zoom link, an article, a video, or any URL that starts with "https". You could, if needed, use this feature to sell a digital item in its own right, like an online course.

All major file formats are accepted – PDFs, Word, Powerpoint, Excel, etc. – and all images and videos are also accepted. If you are uploading a file format that does not meet any of the above criteria, or if you are uploading multiple digital files at once, you will need to include the file(s) into a ZIP file. The system will not accept your upload if you fail to follow these steps. 

Category Collections

If you had a large ecommerce website with many items, you would benefit from using the categories feature to place different item groupings into logical collections. You might have four categories, for example, that break down the different areas in your website. As a clothes shop, there might be a “Women’s” category for all groups containing women’s clothing items, and so on.

In this case, wouldn’t it be great if you were able to present all your categories in one place as an attractive shop window, enabling customers to see all your different departments in one place? Well, with category collections, you can. Just insert the categories you want, make use of the styling tools, and plug it into your home page. Users are then immediately able to see main areas of your website and get to the items they are looking for much faster.

Default Image

Item images are deeply important to any ecommerce website. Customers are unlikely to trust your website if one of your items has a poor-quality image or, even worse, no image at all. Getting the right image for every item matters and doing so may take a bit of time. So, what do you do if your website is live and you don’t have all your item images yet? Well, you would use the default image tool.

You can use this section to upload a suitable image that is automatically inserted for any item for which you have no original images yet. Use something here that is in high-definition and relevant to your ecommerce website. Obviously, in an ideal world, every item will have an image. But if that is not the case, having a professional default image is far better than no image at all.