Editor's Note: This blog was initially published in November 2020, but has since been updated to mention new updates to our feature.
We don’t always spend enough time talking about how drastically your strategy may change from one ecommerce channel to another, when in reality, the rules of engagement are starkly different.
While on marketplaces, your main job is to thwart competitors by creating a stellar listing that earns plenty of positive reviews—on your website, your job involves building a smooth user experience, backed by a strong SEO strategy, that encourages exploration across your whole catalog.
In both situations, how you format your listings plays a key role. This is why we’re brimming with excitement about our latest feature: Listing Splits. Listing Splits enable you to group similar products and display them however you want.
It’s hands-down the most flexible tool of its kind. Easily move products in and out of variation listings depending on the channel, without creating more work or cluttering your catalog. Beta users have already claimed that it has saved them “countless hours” by solving a pain point that didn’t have a remedy—that is, until now.
How It Works
Listings Splits is available to any and every Zentail user. This feature simplifies the way you manage grouped products across multiple channels by helping you essentially “undo” variation listings for Shopify or BigCommerce.
Rather than having to clone SKUs and manage dozens of duplicates to support both “split” (aka individual) and variation listings in your catalog, you can simply toggle a setting on and off.
In Zentail, click “Catalog” on the top nav > Manage Catalog. Then click on the master SKU of any existing product group to open up the left-hand editor. Scroll to the Shopify or BigCommerce section and hit “Advanced Options.”
You should see a button that says “Manage [BigCommerce / Shopify] Listing.” From there, you’ll be able to deselect any existing pivots and preview your variants as individual listings.
That’s it! Your BigCommerce and Shopify changes will not affect your variation listings on Amazon, Walmart Marketplace or elsewhere. You can reap the benefits of a simple, but powerful functionality that, to date, isn’t offered like this anywhere else.
Make Product Discovery Easier on Your Website
The ideal website is clean, easy to navigate and offers plenty of options. In addition to this, a general rule of thumb (from both a user experience and SEO perspective) is that everything should be accessible within three clicks.
Listing Splits let you display all of your product variants as individual listings across your Shopify or BigCommerce site. For example, if you sell one t-shirt in five different colors, you can now show them as five separate listings on your site.
This creates the illusion of a full catalog and ensures that no category page feels empty and no variant goes unseen. This approach can also be helpful for any custom filtering; as buyers filter their search results by color, pattern and more, split listings ensure that the resulting product images and titles all neatly align. Similarly, split listings give you more flexibility with your SEO strategy—you can tailor certain product pages for long-tail keywords, as opposed to lumping them into one general landing page.
At the same time, with Zentail, you can keep those same SKUs grouped together as one variation listing for marketplaces, where your goal is to consolidate reviews and reduce bounce-offs from your product pages.
On Marketplaces: Keep Product Reviews Together
It goes without saying that product reviews are some of the most valuable currencies on Amazon, Walmart.com and other marketplaces. Most, if not all, algorithms prioritize listings that have the highest number of positive reviews.
This is a big reason why variation listings are more effective on marketplaces. You can combine all the reviews you collect from individual variants onto one listing, and multiply your chances of ranking high on search results.
“...products develop a review moat [on marketplaces]. The more reviews a product gets, the more likely people are to buy it. The more likely they are to buy it, the higher it appears in search. The higher it appears in search, the more sales it will have. The more sales it gets, the more reviews…and the cycle repeats!” - Molson Hart, CEO of Viahart
Once a buyer clicks onto your product page, he or she can easily explore all of your options without getting as distracted by other competitive listings.
Simplify Listing Management
As you create and handle multiple formats of one SKU, you can breathe easy knowing that your catalog isn’t becoming bloated with duplicates.
Before now, this was unavoidable. Whether you used Zentail or another system to manage your multichannel listings, ungrouping products meant managing one set of SKUs that powered a variation listing, alongside another set of duplicate SKUs that powered individual listings. A product with 10 variants would suddenly become 20, just like that.
The more products you added to your catalog, the bigger the problem got. Not to mention, you’d have to spend more time organizing your listings on the backend to keep your catalog (somewhat) clean and to mitigate the risk of team members editing the wrong SKU when making revisions in the future.
Now, you can use Zentail to centralize all of your listings in one place and to truly simplify your day-to-day operations
Sell More
Ultimately, the goal of our new feature is to equip you with the right tools to create the best customer experience for each sales channel. Gone are the days when the easiest option was to group your listings the way marketplaces wanted you to, even if it wasn’t ideal for your site.
Now, it’s just as easy to simultaneously ungroup and reformat your listings for Shopify and BigCommerce. You can treat your site listings completely separate from your marketplace listings, and build unique experiences that represent your brand best.
On your site, that means enticing buyers to explore your full catalog and showing them that you have a wide selection of products that meets their needs.
Get Started Today
Ready to take control of your multichannel listings? Contact us today to see Zentail in action and to get started with Listing Splits.
Need Help with Multichannel?
Schedule time with a Zentail expert to see how we can transform your Ecommerce business.
