The site, which bills itself as a "social music experiment" and music search engine, is all that and more.
Using the social media / social networking model, the site allows you to build a playlist of tracks from it's vast collection of audio links and assembles them into a freindly, easy to use flash based media player.
You can log in to PlayList.com and add new tracks, re-arrange what you've already got, send email invites to friends, and share your playlist with others.
This article is intended for Volusion ecommerce software users and contains information about preparing product image files for bulk upload when importing large amounts of products using product data prepared offline or exported from another source.
The information is also helpful if you are migrating from another ecommerce / shopping cart platform and want to save time converting your existing store's product photos for use in Volusion.
For Volusion stores with only small number of products, using the Admin console to upload your product images is very easy. You simply create a product record, click the Upload New Photos link, and follow the prompts. Volusion will automatically size and store your product image file, and create the various sizes it needs to display on category, product and check-out pages.
Identifying trends in language, or more specifically, identifying the words and terms people search for on the internet can be extremely helpful in discovering which words and phrases you should, or shouldn't use on your website to attract new visitors.
Lets say you were starting a business and were going to sell "widgets". You are getting ready to put together your marketing material and source vendors for product, but you aren't sure if people were interested more in "red widgets" or blue widget".
Doing a web search and simply observing the number of listings found on a search engine for either really wouldn't give you any insight into buying trends. But, if you could know which term more people search for, and whether the trend was increasing or decreasing, you would have a much better idea.
There are just two words that sum up the internal search function of Volusion eCommerce shopping cart software -- but being a professional, I won't use those two words, and will instead just say, "not good".
When a user searches your Volusion store, the search only returns results where the search term appears in the Product Code, Product Name or if the words were (manually) entered in the Additional Product Keywords field of a product record. By default, none of the text in product descriptions, product options, category pages, help files, policy pages, the "knowledge base", (or image alt tags, meta data, etc, etc), or any other text in your store is searched.
To enable Volusion's "extensive search", (which does at least search the description fields of your product pages), you need to add the following hidden input field into your search form.
Still the result pages are poorly formatted and since there are no suggestions for mis-spelled words, semantic or contextual search functionality, and no "best match" -- this leaves the user to fumble through the results, or worse; may cause potential customers to leave your site and go to Google or another search engine to locate the product they want to buy.
You May be Losing Sales because of Volusion Search!
So, you're whipping around the admin side of your Volusion store, you delete or add some categories, move some products from one category to another and then go to the user side of the store and the changes don't appear...
I found this problem when a category I deleted was still appearing in the left navigation menu, (and now gave the error message: Category ID# Does not Exist when I clicked it).
Why?... It seems Volusion does not alway publish all your changes immediately -- unless you set the Config Variable telling it to. Worse, sometimes Volusion does not honor this setting, (or forgets it was set), and you need to manually reset the variable.
