Dealing with manufactures with no API for Retailers
So two weeks ago I commented saying I would post about key things I took away from An Event Apart Chicago 2007. Here we are more than two weeks later and nothing.
Fortunately I love my clients. This is why I have had no time for writing about AEA. Currently working with a local clothing shop on a splendid little web presence. Pretty standard site, Xhtml/Css a dash of flash and done! Well sort of.
Apparently in this industry, manufactures do not understand what an API is. That is to say that the manufactures do not offer any API of any sort. Which in an industry like clothing were fashion is changing constantly, this can be an issue for retailers that do not have huge budgets to spend constantly updating their web sites. Retail outlets have little to no recourse for posting online what their manufactures offer but through linking to the manufactures’ website. This seems to unload the burden of smaller retail outlet of having to constantly update their websites with the new seasons fashions.
Great….right? Well not exactly. We (you and I) are in the business of Online marketing, and if there is one thing we know it is that we do not send visitors to some other site where they may loose interest in our clients products/offerings. Heck, they could go to one of these manufactures’ sites and find another retailer to purchase from!
Solution, frames. Yes, I know what I just said….I feel dirty just saying it. BUT it give me the ability to work with the lack of an API and still hopefully not completely sending people off my client’s site. Create a nice banner which includes contact information in plain text along with navigation to contact or break out of the frame. This banner will be a frame at the top of the page when a visitor clicks to view a manufacturer’s website from our clients site. Now we have hopefully retained a potential client. As they browse the manufacturer’s site, our client’s information & branding is still at the top of the page reminding the user who they want to call or visit for their purchase. We have helped the user find what they are looking for along with a retailer to buy it from plus we have helped our client retain a client that may have gotten lost on the manufacturer’s site.
I am sure many readers(yes I mean the two people that read this) are very curious to see exactly what I am talking about along with what I perceive to be a beautiful solution to a real problem. Once the project has been finalized and goes live I will post an update on how this solution worked along with a link to see for yourself.
October 4th, 2007 at 7:38 am
FRAMES? Have you lost it?
As easy as it might be to use them, we all know that they are horrible design wise. If you can pull it off without the page actually looking like it has frames, go for it, but still looks bad in the web design industry and I believe the search engines skip over those sites that use frames. IMO its a bad marketing move, especially for a business web site.
I would suggest googling a way to use a frame without actually using a frame and seeing if there is a way to implement a positive outcome for those that are not up-to-date with the API ways.
And if I am part of that 2 people who read this.. Yes.. I am going to want to see the result!
PS, yeah I am going to start replying with BPD… its a marketing buff
October 4th, 2007 at 3:34 pm
No the site will not have the traditional “I am Framed” look. I will most likely be using an iFrame over the standard html based frame tags. Not 100% sure though. The SEO value of the vendor pages is not relevant though. I will look into what the major search engines will do but I do not need the clients banner + vendor site indexed together.
I will post the final result. I guess maybe I jumped the gun on what I was implying I was going to use in the post.
October 4th, 2007 at 4:03 pm
It could have also been that I read that totally wrong also!
I am not sure about iFrames. I haven’t really ventured into that section too much. My thinking lately to make my sites browser resolution OK. Mainly via css / js by resizing it based on their resolution. Not doing it the old way of just making it in 1024 x 768. Just trying to make everything in css.. it seems a bit easier…
February 23rd, 2008 at 9:57 pm
[…] I eluded to in my previous post (Deal with manufactures with no API for their retailers) frames were going to be the final solution. Not just frames though an iframe. Before I get to deep […]