So Easy to Get Confused

Plush Baby Animals

I found a huge mistake in the catalog today, and it took quite a bit of time to fix it. I somehow managed to put up two pages that had some of the same pictures on them. I am feeling so much better now that I did not get all stressed and upset the way I would have back when I made the mistake. I was feeling so bad back then that I can't be surprised for making the mess. I had to change the numbering on a bunch of items, move some photos around, and fix the Google Base feed to correspond to the current numbering, but I did it.

I have now put over 500 plush toys online in our catalog, and we have had quite a few sales from it, too. I am working on putting up the Security Blankies now, but it will take me awhile to get the pages to a point that I can put them online. I have been experimenting with how to categorize them, and I hope I have come up with logical page categories.

I have also taken all the many puppets we have bought over the last few years and re-boxed them into what I hope will be reasonable categories, too, but I am a long way from taking all the photos and putting the descriptions up. But, I see progress in my storage system, and continue to work on making all our toys easier to find when someone asks for help finding a lost lovie on our Plush Memories Lost Toy Search Service.

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We hope you will find the lovey you are looking for in our DIRTY BUTTER Plush Animals and Soft Dolls CATALOG. But we have many more toys in stock than we have listed, so please Contact Us if you don't see what you are looking for. If we don't have it in stock, we will search the Internet for it. If we still can't find it, we will post your request on our Plush Memories Lost Toy Search Service.

SingleFeed is a BIG Help!

Plush Baby Animals

The folks from SingleFeed asked me to write a testimonial the other day, and I figured I would post it here, whether they end up using any of it or not on their own site.

We have been selling on eBay since 2002, gradually becoming more involved and business like as we went. We have also been working toward selling from our own website for some time now, and we finally have a small part of our inventory in our online catalog. I tried uploading our items to Google Base all by myself, but was having difficulties. It makes more sense to spend my time taking pictures, writing descriptions, and filling orders than to get bogged down with the details of sending a perfect feed to Google every time we add to our catalog. Sometimes that can be several times a week, as our inventory is sold and I add more items to the catalog.

Since I started using SingleFeed, I don’t have to spend any appreciable time on this part of our business at all. It took awhile to get the data feed set up the way SingleFeed requires it, but their directions made sense, the download gave me a template to work from, and they helped – something Google does not do. Now that I have a data file set up correctly, all I need to do is add our new items to the file and click Upload on SingleFeed’s site. On those rare occasions when I do make an error in the Excel form, I get an immediate response, showing which items are faulty and what the problem is. I can fix it immediately, upload again, and it’s all taken care of.

We are a small business, so for now, at least, we only use SingleFeed for Google Base. But it is very reassuring to know that if we ever decide to become involved with the comparison shopping sites, we are all ready for it. Some people might think it is foolish to pay for something I could eventually figure out for myself, but my time is definitely worth something and is much better spent on other aspects of our business. Using SingleFeed was a good business decision for us.

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We hope you will find the lovey you are looking for in our DIRTY BUTTER Plush Animals and Soft Dolls CATALOG. But we have many more toys in stock than we have listed, so please Contact Us if you don't see what you are looking for. If we don't have it in stock, we will search the Internet for it. If we still can't find it, we will post your request on our Plush Memories Lost Toy Search Service.

Can't Find a Website Search I Like!

Eden Plush Baby Peter Rabbit Animals

I've tried bunch of free to try software packages that provide a website search, but so far nothing does what I want. I've about decided to pay a programmer to do it for me. We're also considering pulling all our toys off eBay and just using that for our vintage collectibles. There are lots of pros and cons on that one, so we're in no hurry to decide.

I did pay the $100 to try the Business Version of Google's Custom Search. But the directions were basically no less confusing than the regular Custom Search. Looks like all you are really paying for is not having their ads on the page. I canceled it the same day I bought it, and did not have any problem getting my money back.

So I continue to take photos and add to our catalog, making do with the Catalog Search I have for now that is the Google Base search page.

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We hope you will find the lovey you are looking for in our DIRTY BUTTER Plush Animals and Soft Dolls CATALOG. But we have many more toys in stock than we have listed, so please Contact Us if you don't see what you are looking for. If we don't have it in stock, we will search the Internet for it. If we still can't find it, we will post your request on our Plush Memories Lost Toy Search Service.

Haven't Found a Website Search Form I Like Yet

Plush Baby Dolls

I seem to be stuck on finding exactly what I want for the Search on our Catalog. What I am using now is a refined Google Base Search, but that is on a separate Google page, and not part of our own website. It also, since it is a Google page, has links to other sellers. That's not a good idea, but will have to do until I can find better.

Something else I have realized I need to do is to put a bookmark link to each of the photos on a given catalog page, so when someone does click on the search item it will take them straight to that item, not just the page it is on. Again, a website designer would have already done that to begin with, but I am learning all this the hard way, by trial and error. More error - it seems like! LOL!!

But, we are making sales from the Catalog, so for that I am grateful.

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We hope you will find the lovey you are looking for in our DIRTY BUTTER Plush Animals and Soft Dolls CATALOG. But we have many more toys in stock than we have listed, so please Contact Us if you don't see what you are looking for. If we don't have it in stock, we will search the Internet for it. If we still can't find it, we will post your request on our Plush Memories Lost Toy Search Service.

Continuing to Add to Catalog

Carter's Plush Baby Dolls

The SingleFeed spreadsheet continues to work well, so I can update Google Base each day. I decided on Mal's Shopping Cart, and I am pleased with the ease of use for a free program. There were a few mistakes I made in the Cart setup, but it only took the first few customers to find what needed to be fixed. They do provide an easy way to see and test the cart while you are working on it.

I don't have to send any information to Mal's, because the code goes in each item listing in the Catalog, and even lets me tell the Shopping Cart where to send the buyer when they finish.

The only real flaw I have found with it is I cannot LIMIT the quantity available. I ended up putting a large warning sign on each page of the catalog, telling people that we only had one of each item in most cases. This flaw showed up when someone ordered 4 of an item. It's free, and even paid software usually has a few parts that don't fit someone's particular situation, so I am satisfied with its performance.

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We hope you will find the lovey you are looking for in our DIRTY BUTTER Plush Animals and Soft Dolls CATALOG. But we have many more toys in stock than we have listed, so please Contact Us if you don't see what you are looking for. If we don't have it in stock, we will search the Internet for it. If we still can't find it, we will post your request on our Plush Memories Lost Toy Search Service.

Waiting on Google to Index our Catalog

Eden Plush Baby Dolls

OK, I have the beginnings of our products Searchable on Google Base now, thanks to the free trial of SingleFeed I'm using. It costs $4.99 a month, but they fix the mistakes in the data feed so it does not get denied by Google.

You may ask why I'm paying someone to send the feed to Google Base.

The answer is simple.

I never could figure out what I was doing wrong, and Google is no help at all.

You can pay more at SingleFeed and use one form to submit to lots of different shopping search engines like Shopping.com, but Google will be enough for our needs. I have already sent three feeds to them, and it was not hard at all, as I already had most of what they wanted in an Excel file already, thanks to my attempts to send the data feed to Google on my own.

Now my problem is that our plushcatalog.dirtybutter.com subdomain has not been Indexed by Google yet, so I can't create a working Custom Search Engine to put on our catalog pages yet. I have sent a Site Map of the subdomain to Google, so all I can do now is wait. As I add items to the catalog I will send a new SingleFeed upload, update the Site Map, and keep on waiting.

It's that wait that prompted me to start this blog about the process of starting our own website sales. Google is good about indexing blogs pretty quickly, but puts new websites in what is called the sandbox. Basically it means they hold onto new sites for awhile before they acknowledge their existence, in an attempt to discourage spammers from flooding their searches with fake sites. I understand why they do it, but it is very frustrating for those legitimate sellers like us who are trying to get a place in the search engine.

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We hope you will find the lovey you are looking for in our DIRTY BUTTER Plush Animals and Soft Dolls CATALOG. But we have many more toys in stock than we have listed, so please Contact Us if you don't see what you are looking for. If we don't have it in stock, we will search the Internet for it. If we still can't find it, we will post your request on our Plush Memories Lost Toy Search Service.

Are All the Catalog Links Accurate?

Carter's Plush Baby Animals

I've changed my mind several times about what the URL of our catalog should be, because I was having problems getting the Google Base Product Search to ignore all the posts on our Lost Toy Search Service blog. So, in the process of creating the links one way, then changing them to something else, and then making a final decision for try number three, I'm having to correct lots of wrong links. I found one today that was caused by using Find/Replace All, when I did not think through what I needed to type in the blanks. So, now I am searching through all our site URL's to change plushplush to just plush!

At least I learned a long time ago how to make custom 404 Not Found pages that would allow the reader to find what they wanted. Hopefully, the links on those error pages are correct. Guess I'd better go be sure of that!

This is a perfect example of learning from my mistakes, but it's still aggravating. Of course, people who make websites for a living would have long ago figured out the best navigation configuration for a product catalog. And I think I have a good arrangement now, but who knows?????

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We hope you will find the lovey you are looking for in our DIRTY BUTTER Plush Animals and Soft Dolls CATALOG. But we have many more toys in stock than we have listed, so please Contact Us if you don't see what you are looking for. If we don't have it in stock, we will search the Internet for it. If we still can't find it, we will post your request on our Plush Memories Lost Toy Search Service.