Super cross selling to boost sales and search ranking!

I have always wanted to do this, but never found the time for it, but this time I know I HAVE to do it. I have been working hard to help many of our clients to boost sales as well as increasing their rankings on search engines and I found the ultimate weakness of the current XSell system for Zencart:

  1. It is manual labor work, and very time consuming. Many of my clients have stores that reach hundreds of thousands of products. It is almost impossible to cross sell manually.
  2. It is based on the store owners’ assumption (you assume customers want to see X if they are checking Y)

So I want to create a whole new cross sell module that would take into account many many things:

  1. Using matching score, each product will have a match score against other products
  2. Matching product titles and description to find similarity
  3. Taking into account orders (just like the “also purchased” module currently works)
  4. Taking into account customers’ view behavior (which products the customers viewed before the current product?)
  5. Taking into account searches and related searches by tracking customers’ searches
  6. Taking into account product tags assigned by store owners and customers

Obviously, this is a bunch of work and has to be developed one by one, so I’m thinking of breaking it down to several smaller modules

  1. Tag module: allowing store owners and customers entering tags, allowing filtering and searching by tags. This will be based on the concept found here.
  2. Search module: tracking users’ searches
  3. The finally, the new Cross Sell module with the concept based on YARPP.

Now what do you think? Is there any feature worth adding (or throwing away)? Also, obviously this huge module will need financial support since I don’t have the ability to get funds from various merchants like the Zencart team. So the chance is high that it will be sold as an open-source commercial module to fund the continuous development of this module. If so, will you support it?

Obviously, your comments/advices will help me a long way in achieving this.

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3 Comments

  1. Isaac says:

    First off, thank you so much for your contribution to the Zen Cart community. This is a great concept and one that we will be willing to support and beta test as well. Some features that would be nice are things like:

    Search auto complete functionality: by this I mean suggesting as the customer is typing their keywords. It’s basically keyword suggestion as the customer is typing like you see when using Google or Amazon.

    Search Suggestion: This actually an opportunity to provide tips to customers on the search page on how to use search keywords to get best result.

    Search Feedback: This is a feature for the customer to provide a feedback when they search for something that they didn’t get the result expected.

    The above features will offer some data mining that can be incorporated into the tag functionality to make it user friendly.

    Reply
  2. Russ says:

    Matching product titles and description to find similarity

    the above option is particularly interesting, as it would be beneficial to show customers items with the same relevant keyword.
    Also tracking by searches is very useful too.

    Reply
  3. Linda says:

    Hi!

    How did it go whit the whole new cross sell module?

    That module would be verry interesting..

    All the best!!

    Reply

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