This is not a photo its a screen shot - give me back my old google analytics!

Social shopping sites have hit the US by storm and also search engines. An item placed on Crowdstorm will be indexed on search engines within the week. Unfortunately no link is provided by Crowdstorm to the item but if it is Brand awareness and customer appreciation you want then Crowdstorm is for you. More specialist sites have cropped up like Stylehive where you can provide a link and tags for the item. Most of the items on style hive are fashion orientated, but again heavily optimised. If you are struggling for a particular keyword ranking then a site such as stylehive (as long as the products match) is for you. Other sites to include in this post are Kaboodle, ThisNext and Wists. When you join any one of these sites you are given an array of free widgets to show off your choices and recommendations on your blog or site. A smart retailer will make sure that he or she has some of her products on these sites to make sure certain keywords are covered.

I love new things coming to the UK! Google checkout promises to be a great one. One or two obvious snags I have found in the first instance…

1. Items must be shipped within 3 days of the payment being charged

2. Only one website per account.

Many people have multiple websites and need to be able to integrate on a site by site basis. The payments on my Google account are ‘authorised’ and you have a charge button next to it. This is how I plan to cope with the processing times of some of my orders. Its manual, but I won’t press charge till the item is ready to ship. If the card declines then, I am buggered, but we shall see how stung I get in the coming months. I shall report any annoyances with the new system!

You have 500mb of image hosting with your channeladvisor account and you can upload these on bulk using an FTP client. One is shall discuss today is ‘Smart FTP‘

Your can download Smart FTP Here

When you first log into this application you need to enter the channeladvisor FTP address:

Then your user name with your login prefix (found in settings>image hosting) and your normal account password, the press ‘enter’:

Under the new tab that will pop up you will have a blank bar. You will need to place a / in this bar ( the yellow folder will appear once you press enter):

You can now drag an image into the right hand pane and you will see your image pop in as a file. You can only upload files and not folders.

Make sure you images are re-sized to 400-600px wide and the size you want them. Now go to tool>images in channel management and click ‘bulk upload files using ftp’ and this will start your FTP scan. Your scan might be set to ever hour by default anyway.

Unfortunately, there is not an easy way to do this but it can be done.

Here is an outline of the steps that you will need to take to get the images from your account:

1. Go to the Tools > Images view.
2.  Expand the view to 500 items.
3.  click on the “Select” column header to select all 500 images.
4.  click on the “View URLs” button
5.  Here, you will see two boxes, one that says image URLs and one that says HTML.  You will want to copy everything out of the HTML box.
6.  Paste the HTML box contents into notepad (TextPad is another text editor that is usually not a default.  You may need to download this from the internet, it is free.) 7.  Simply repeat and keep adding the rest of the images Textpad, you can only pull 500 at a time.
8.  Save the file in HTML format ( with .html as the file extension)  Also, choose another name for the file when you save.
9.  Open the file with Internet Explorer.
10.  After the images load up, in internet explorer, you can go to Page > Save.
11.  choose another name for the save.
12.  When this is completed, all the images will then be saved to your computer into a folder.