Digital Scientists - Blog by Lucas

Excel Is Still the eCommerce Powerhouse – Use It to Scale your Business in 2025

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 09:24:30 +0000

Today in the life of a Digital Scientist, our eCommerce expert, Lucas explores how spreadsheets can revolutionise online product management, making workflows more efficient and freeing up valuable resources to ultimately scale your business.

Managing a large product catalogue can be overwhelming, with many businesses spending countless hours manually updating inventory, often neglecting automation that could save both time and money. This not only ties up staff with repetitive tasks but also diverts focus from strategic growth. If your team is still manually adjusting online listings within an eCommerce platform, few workflow changes could have a greater impact on your business in 2025, especially when managing many products.

Transforming Your Workflow with Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets can drastically accelerate inventory management by enabling bulk updates with ease. Whether it’s adjusting prices, managing stock levels, or applying complex formulas for taxes, margins, and promotions, spreadsheets offer unparalleled flexibility.

Most eCommerce platforms (including Shopify, Magento, Amazon, and eBay) support spreadsheet imports, making this an invaluable skill regardless of what platform you’re using. Imagine you’re selling across multiple platforms and have been manually updating each one: Learning to manage your catalogue via spreadsheets instantly unlocks a faster, smarter way to synchronise products across all channels, saving hours of unnecessary labour.

Many business owners and staff procrastinate on manual updates simply because they are time-consuming and tedious, but delaying these changes could negatively impact sales, causing lost revenue opportunities. With spreadsheets, these adjustments become seamless and instant, ensuring your products are always up to date without workflow bottlenecks.

What Can Spreadsheets Do That eCommerce Platforms Can’t?

Every eCommerce platform comes with limitations, but spreadsheets break these barriers by offering deeper control over your data. Here’s what spreadsheets enable you to do that many platforms struggle with:

• Bulk Data Editing: Quickly update hundreds or thousands of products at once, adjusting prices, descriptions, and categories with ease.

• Advanced Reporting and Analysis: Use custom formulas and charts to analyse sales trends, customer behaviour, and inventory movement.

• Custom Pricing Rules: Set up sophisticated discount structures, profit margin calculations, and automated pricing strategies that platforms may not support.

• Multi-Platform Product Management: Effortlessly compare and merge data across different platforms like your website, eBay, and Amazon, allowing for smarter pricing and inventory decisions. Seamlessly carry over data across platforms and databases, ensuring consistency and accuracy in your product management.

• AI-Powered Adjustments: AI can automate mass updates in spreadsheets using CSV files, applying rules based on prompts or data analysis. For example, AI can adjust pricing across thousands of SKUs based on competitor trends, auto-categorise products, or flag stock inconsistencies, streamlining workflow and reducing manual effort.

This is the definition of working smarter, not harder!

Simplifying Product Management for an RC Retailer: A Shift to Automation

Using one of our clients as an example, a retailer specialising in RC models and parts, were managing over 8,000 SKUs (stock keeping units) across a complex product catalogue. Their store featured a vast range of boats, cars, and miniature RC components like motors, ESCs, and trim tabs. With new stock constantly being added, or needing adjustments, manual updates became unmanageable for their small team. For example, when one supplier sent over their database, they may have updated SKUs, prices, product descriptions, among other adjustments. With a maintained database and backed up data from previous uploads, we are quickly able to open their master file and match up the new product data supplied to overwrite various product details without impacting other aspects that may have not changed, such as specifications. This allows us as a process to perform these updates quickly for import rather than manually updating listings one at a time which would entail many multiple clicks, data entry, as well as time reviewing and publishing listings one at a time.

Now imagine, on occasion, that your supplier informs you they made a mistake with their latest database and your team have days, if not weeks, manually updating listings. With an excel sheet, third party mistakes are resolved in mere minutes as you just quickly revert to a previous version.

By introducing spreadsheets into their workflow, the process of uploading new products from supplier price lists, often containing over 200+ new items at a time was significantly more efficient. Using formulas, we extracted key details with ease, applied pricing calculations, and prepared bulk uploads in minutes rather than hours.

As a result, new products went live instantly, reducing stock delays; manual workload was dramatically reduced, saving the business time and allowing staff to focus on more critical tasks.

With their catalogue running like clockwork, the business could focus on higher-value strategies like driving traffic, increasing sales, and boosting brand visibility. If you want an expert to take care of your product database and growth online, not only do our QuickFireSEO team maintain and improve your listings over time, we also significantly impact their performance and sales through multiple online channels. So, if spreadsheets aren’t your strong point, you now know who you can partner with!

By leveraging spreadsheets, businesses can eliminate inefficiencies, streamline workflows, and uncover new growth opportunities. This efficient approach not only accelerated product launches but also freed up valuable time for high-impact marketing initiatives.

Automating manual catalogue updates saved both time and money, allowing the business to focus on growth and visibility. One key example was responding to community queries about the best products for specific RC model functions. By doing so, they positioned their products in visible locations while also building backlinks to the client’s site. This significantly improved search rankings, increased traffic, and boosted sales.

Sales saw both direct and indirect benefits, as the time saved was reinvested in outreach efforts. With our strategic guidance, the business maximised its impact across multiple fronts.

How Can You Correlate the Use of Spreadsheets and Databases to Grow Your Business?

• Keep your listings fresh and relevant with bulk imports, ensuring search engines favour your site.

• Up-to-date product data helps your site rank for changing user behaviour and search queries, keeping you ahead of competitors.

• Detailed, accurate product information builds trust, reduces hesitation, and leads to more sales.

• A consistently updated catalogue positions your site as the go-to resource, increasing customer loyalty and repeat visits.

• Quickly listing new products ensures your site is indexed before competitors, capturing early sales opportunities.

• Outdated or incomplete listings frustrate users - keeping them accurate ensures longer session times which impact search rankings.

• A well-maintained database fuels higher visibility, increased conversions, and long-term customer retention, compounding your success over time.

The sooner you upload content to your listings, the faster it can be indexed by Google, increasing visibility and driving more traffic, enquiries, and growth. This, in turn, generates more revenue for further expansion.

Furthermore, this approach can also be taken to managing large websites with pages, blogs and articles as well, allowing updates on mass across the whole site directory.

The below trending data shows consistent growth in clicks over the previous 16 months, the only fall was seasonal and came during the Christmas period as users shut down and enjoyed the festivities. Making updates on mass when listing hundreds to thousands of products allows you to hugely impact your SEO and growth online.

Our client's clicks doubled in the past year thanks to the extra time we dedicated to marketing and SEO while managing 8,000 SKUs.

Take Control of Your Product Catalogue Today

If you're exploring alternatives to Microsoft Excel for managing your database needs, Zoho offers a free alternative called Zoho Sheets, available within Zoho One alongside other paid subscription plans.

For those unfamiliar, Zoho One is a comprehensive operating system designed to support an entire business, giving you the ability to digitise every departmental requirement through to advanced workflow automation essentially moving your business to autonomous operation.

As Zoho partners in the UK, Europe, and the United States, we help businesses reduce wasted time and maximise profitability through smart workflow solutions.

From database management and bulk updates to seamless automation with the Zoho suite and other SaaS tools, we ensure your operations run smoothly, freeing up your team to focus on growth.

With 20+ years of experience in SEO and digital transformation, we don’t just optimise your database, we elevate your entire product catalogue, improving the performance of category, collection, and individual product pages for maximum search visibility and conversions.

Ready to streamline your business and drive real results? Explore our Fusion Flow team for systems and automation, or leverage our QuickFireSEO services to dominate your online sales channels.

How Does Effective Product Data Impact The Growth of Your Business?

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 07:30:00 +0000

In the fast-paced world of eCommerce, the way product data is presented can be the difference between success and missed opportunities. Lucas, our digital scientist, breaks down the power of comprehensive product data, including downloadable datasheets hosted on your own server instead of third-party platforms. He also reveals how we streamlined the process of updating hundreds of product listings in just minutes.

Why is Product Data and Downloadable Resources Important to Conversions?

Implementing rich product data and structured schema isn’t just about refining product listings, it’s about unlocking untapped potential on platforms like Google Merchant Center. The more detailed the product information, the more search engines can extract, rank, and prioritise listings, leading to higher visibility, increased traffic, and ultimately, more sales.

The particular client we’re referencing today operates in a highly technical industry, where customers often struggle to understand complex products. We greatly understand the importance for clear, accessible resources, including detailed specifications, user manuals, and datasheets, to support informed purchasing decisions, among other benefits. By making this information easily available, businesses can:

•Boost customer confidence, leading to higher conversions

•Reduce costly returns, preventing incorrect purchases due to missing data

•Improve user experience, ensuring seamless installation and operation

By presenting products professionally with detailed documentation, we build trust and credibility within the community, giving customers confidence in the product's quality and capabilities. Additionally, these resources help reduce general questions and support queries, as customers can find the answers they need independently; this allows our client to focus on higher-priority tasks, improving overall productivity and reducing the need for additional support staff to handle easily solvable queries. Less overhead equals greater opportunity to invest in growth to the bottom line.

Optimising a single product listing may have a small impact, but applying this across thousands of products can transform your entire business. Addressing this one issue at scale has the potential to drive significant growth, increasing sales and visibility almost overnight.

Good fundamental image and resource use leads to strong significant growth as shown in this GSC chart.

It’s Importance to SEO and Growth

From an SEO standpoint, adding rich datasheets gives your site an edge over competitors who lack this level of detail. Search engines favour valuable, well-structured content, leading to higher rankings and more organic traffic. Additionally, hosting datasheets on your own server prevents loss of link equity and crawl budget. When search engines index product pages, keeping them within your domain ensures authority stays with your site, rather than being redirected to third-party platforms, which can dilute your SEO performance. This is a powerful yet often overlooked SEO strategy, one that we’ll explore further in a future post.

Updating Hundreds of Products in Minutes

To ensure every product had its own dedicated datasheet storage, we first exported the full product database, using part numbers as unique identifiers. These part numbers became the names of individual folders, creating a structured directory ready for automation.

We sourced the latest datasheets directly from the manufacturer’s website and placed them in their respective folders. Once organised, we enabled public access, generating unique URLs for each product’s datasheets, ensuring instant availability.

Rather than manually linking each datasheet to its product page, we designed a branded button in Adobe Illustrator that seamlessly fits the website’s aesthetics. Clicking this button would direct users to the relevant datasheet folder.

Manually adding these buttons to every product page would have been an enormous task. Instead, we leveraged a spreadsheet-driven approach, completing the process in under five minutes. Using VLOOKUP and SUBSTITUTE formulas, we mapped each product’s part number to its corresponding datasheet URL and inserted it into the product descriptions automatically.

Want to see how we made this happen? Watch our demonstration video showcasing the entire Excel automation process.

Your browser does not support the video tag.

How Can We Impact Thousands of Your Product Listings and the Growth of Your Business?

If your business faces similar challenges in organising and presenting product information effectively, we're here to help. we specialise in creating tailored solutions that enhance user experience, improve efficiency, and ultimately drive sales.

Contact us today to discuss how our Pixel Perfect team can support your business with smart, scalable solutions that meet your unique needs.

Transforming Landing Pages for Maximum Traffic

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 09:28:19 +0000

At Digital Scientists, Lucas has re-designed a client’s landing page with a clear focus: to generate new traffic through enhanced content and headers. Our client had been struggling to attract visitors due to low search engine visibility and ineffective on-page copy. As a marketing agency, we know that valuable content is essential for strong search engine rankings. Without it, a page is likely to underperform, which is why we place great importance on crafting effective page copy.

Why Does a Page Need Good Copy?

Without topically relevant content, search engines will struggle to understand the page's specific context, and may subsequently target the wrong queries. You can identify when a page is not liked by a search engine as it will be crawled but not indexed, or if it is indexed when you check the page performance you will see it effectively jump in and out of the index as on some days it will have no impressions vs others with no positive trend in place. There can of course be other reasons for this, not just relating to page copy, but these can be extensive and so we won’t go into those in this article today.

As a simple example when a page indexes very well for its topic, you will see thousands of relevant user queries vs potentially only a handful as the search indexes struggle to understand relevance and match them to user queries. From the perspective of an SEO, this is a simplification but overall one of the first assessments we do when looking at a project is to assess content and GSC performance and availability of data. In the graph below, we can see an example of a page that isn’t performing well and is dropping in and out of the index due to lack of relevant content.

How to Create Valuable Webpage Copy

To ensure the copy is optimised for Google's ranking algorithm, one of the commonly used tools is Google Search Console (GSC) to identify actual user queries to formulate as part of a broader content strategy. One commonly overlooked basic requirement for a page to signal to a search engine its context is from using the H1 header which is one of many on-site adjustments that can be made which typically most companies get wrong with for example their homepage where the H1 header simply states “welcome” rather than indicating what the site or business is about. For instance, we incorporated the query “Commercial Office Cleaning” into the H1 header of the page. This query had a high number of impressions, indicating strong potential to attract clicks if used effectively.

Using GSC, we can create a plan based on the client’s existing data. This data helps us decide which user queries to address, such as adding Q&A sections, and identify opportunities to optimise image usage, ensuring they appear in the index. After making these adjustments, we can request indexing through GSC to ensure the changes are quickly reflected. This allows us to track and measure the impact of our updates effectively.

We plan to monitor GSC data to evaluate its impact for our client. We expect to see an improvement in the query’s ranking position, leading to increased number of clicks over time.

Perhaps now you’re interested in optimising your own site for popular queries? Visit our QuickFireSEO page to find out how we can help.