# Magento and the New FedEx Shipping Rates Calculated by Dimensional Weight

Unfortunate news for online retailers was announced by FedEx early this month. Beginning in January 1, 2015 FedEx will be transitioning all ground packaging to the same dimensional (DIM) weight pricing structure as their Express services. This will have a big impact on shipping costs for retailers of large, yet lightweight items (think ping pong balls) as well as e-commerce websites who will now need to change the way they are calculating shipping costs. DIM weight shipping fees take into account the size of the package, not just the weight. This is done by taking the cubic volume of your package and dividing by 166 (the international calculation is divided by 139). For example, the shipping price of a 12” x 12” x 12” box that weighed 3 pounds would really be calculated using 11 pounds. If your business ships in smaller boxes, it’s likely you won’t be affected by the rate increases, but for shops that will be affected it’s going to amount to a significant increase in shipping costs. It’s also likely that FedEx won’t be alone in this change as there have been rumors that UPS will soon follow suit.


Magento shops facing the new FedEx DIM weight changes are now facing the challenge of calculating the shipping on the front end using the DIM weight of the shipment. Currently, Magento doesn’t take into account package sizes for products so that it can make this calculation. If the Magento team decides to roll this out into a future release, which it seems would be likely with this new announcement; it still won’t solve the problem of pricing products that can be shipped together in single boxes. If a customer buys 4 items that would normally be shipped solo in an 6” x 6” x 6” box, but could all be shipped together in a 12” x 6” x 6” box, the difference in the calculated DIM weight rate your customers would see (8 pounds) and what you would really pay for (3 pounds) is 5 pounds. This increased price in live rate calculation is sure to send your customers searching elsewhere for a better deal. So besides moving carriers or switching to table rates, what are the options for Magento store owners? Luckily, the Magento team at Fruition has the experience of setting up systems that will offer accurate DIM Weight rate calculations. We’ve implemented solutions that will let store owners add their shipping boxes to the Magento system, apply products to them and choose ways that products can be combined into larger boxes. More accurate rate calculations on the front end of your store will ensure your customers will receive a better shopping experience and you won’t miss out on the added expenses. If you’re interested in learning how Fruition can help your Magento store prepare for the upcoming changes feel free to give us a call at **303-395-1880** or send us a message.

Fruition offers solutions for Magento shops to navigate FedEx's dimensional weight pricing changes for better front-end rate calculations and shopping experiences.

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Optimizing FedEx DIM Weight in Magento - Solutions by Fruition

# Generating Product Variants for Google Shopping Feeds

Google shopping bag Google Shopping is an insanely helpful tool for bringing new customers to your store. However, merchants who sell apparel online may have recently run into an issue with the 2014 Google Shopping update. During this update Google seems to have taken a slightly harder stance on acceptable product feeds for apparel and is now enforcing the rule that requires merchants to provide variants for these products. We recently encountered this issue with an existing Magento client who generates a large number of sales through Google Shopping. Prior to the update, their feed would only send a single entry to Google Shopping for a product that had multiple size and color options. This had worked without any issues for over a year, but after the new Google Shopping update took place, their feed was soon suspended because it didn't provide the now required product variants.

## How Google Shopping Product Variants Work

To start, Google only requires product variants be submitted for products that fall into the “Apparel & Accessories” Google Shopping category. This applies to shirts, shoes and other clothing items that may be available in different colors, materials, patterns or sizes. If your store sales these types of items and you want to push product to Google Shopping, you’ll need to come up with a feed that accounts for all of your product’s available variants. On the surface, understanding how this works is pretty simple. Google provides a straight forward solution for how these variants should be accounted for in your feed. A quick example would be a product called **‘Mens V-Neck’** with an id of **‘m-vneck’** that is available in **‘Medium’** and **‘Large’**, and comes in colors **‘Red’** and **‘Green’**. Google requires you provide a unique entry with a unique ‘id’ for each of these variants, but also provide an **‘item group id’** that ties all of these products together. Here is an example:

id	item group id	title	size	color
m-vneck-m-r	m-vneck	Mens V-Neck	Medium	Red
m-vneck-m-g	m-vneck	Mens V-Neck	Medium	Green
m-vneck-l-r	m-vneck	Mens V-Neck	Large	Red
m-vneck-l-g	m-vneck	Mens V-Neck	Large	Green
(You can see the full specs for product variants on Google Shopping here.)

This example is still missing a lot of required attributes, but shows how **‘id’** and **‘item group id’** should be used. The attribute ‘id’ still needs to be unique for all of your individual entries, and for products that belong to one group, the **‘item group id’** should remain the same.

## Automating the Google Shopping Feed on Magento
After defining what we needed to supply in the feed to make Google Shopping happy, our next task was automating this process so the daily generated feed included the new ‘item group id’ tag. This is where things started to get a little hairy. Our client manages around 1900 SKUs with an average of roughly 5 color options and 10 size options for each product. Instead of managing 65k individual SKUs and using Magento Configurable Products, we opted to use an extension called Advanced Product Options by MageWorx in order to manage a single product for each product group. This extension also allows us to manage price, SKU and q at the Custom Option level using a Parent > Child relationship between a color and a unique run of sizes. Our custom options area for each product is pretty robust, but our client is able to save a lot of time in overall product management. For the existing feed, we were using Wyomind’s Data Feed Manager extension to automate the daily generation of the XML. Wyomind offers a lot of configuration for managing which products are added to a feed based on category, product type, price, availability, cost, color and almost every other attribute assigned to your products. It also takes care of assigning Google Product Categories at the Magento category level which is very helpful. We did have a problem though, Wyomind wouldn’t handle the Parent > Child relationship that APO provided for its custom options and it was impossible to have the two extensions work together to generate a feed without any customization. Luckily we had a great naming pattern in place for our APO options, and Wyomind offered a way to at least run through every custom option that was assigned to a product. Because each product always started with the color options “Color”, and because every assigned run of sizes was named “Color in Size XX’, we were able to update the output of the Wyomind export and generate an XML feed that we could post-process in order to generate a feed that Google would happily approve. We ran into some other minor challenges related to Google needing a unique image for each color option, and having to adjust the feed generation code to load the final Color > Size QTY vs. the Simple Product QTY. These were all fairly easy to adjust once we had the heavy lifting out of the way and our client is once again an approved Google Merchant with over 16,000 individual product ids being fed in their Google Shopping feed instead of their original 1,200. If product variants have you stumped and you’re unable to properly push your Apparel catalog onto Google Shopping, you’re missing out on a huge marketing opportunity. Reach out and see if our team can fix your product feed and help your store gain more visibility. Post by Chance Carlin



Having issues with product variants in your Google Shopping feed? The Magento pros at Fruition developed a custom extension to feed product variants.

Generating Product Variants for Google Shopping Feeds - E-Commerce

# New Google Shopping & GTIN Requirements

Anyone working with Google Shopping and AdWords to create PLA’s for their products has gone through the tedious process of data clean-up and the feed generation process. For online retailers new to the process, it can be a bit overwhelming. This is especially true for e-tailers who have large product databases that might not have the cleanest data. Unforturnately, Google is ramping up to start enforcing a further data requirement in shopping feeds.

### About the New Google Shopping Requirements
Last year, Google added to this workload by rolling out some requirements for the data they receive from customers in their feeds. Two stood out as possibly being more challenging to overcome than others. First was the requirement for products with color and size options to be fed to Google with Groupings. We covered this update in a previous blog post, Generating Produce Variants for Google Shopping Feeds. Next was Google’s requirement for products in feeds to be submitted with a GTIN and Brand attribute value set for all products listed with a Condition of ‘new.’ GTINs, or Global Trade Item Numbers, are unique values registered and assigned to a single product. For example, a GTIN would be unique to a size 10 shoe, and can’t be assigned to all sizes of a style of shoe. Some products will have UPCs, EANs, JANs, ISBNs and ITF-14s, which are all a subset of GTIN and can be used. This doesn’t seem like a huge hurdle, but for a lot of retailers it can definitely be a hassle for a few reasons:
1. If an e-tailer doesn’t have the GTIN data available from their vendors it can result in a lot of manual lookup to find the correct information.
2. If an e-tailer’s data feed isn’t set up to spit out GTINs, it can cause some extra development work to get this function working properly.
3. If an e-tailer has variant products (ie. Color and Size combinations) and doesn’t have these set up so that individual options have a GTIN assigned, there is likely both development and data work that needs to take place in order to get these feeds up to Google's new standards and requirements.

Luckily, enforcement of these requirements is relegated to a handful of retailers at the moment, about 50 major brands. It’s also limited to PLAs targeting Australia, Brazil, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, the UK and the US.

### Upcoming Enforcement

That limited reach is about to change. Google sent out an email on February 2 that stated it would begin enforcing GTIN requirements more strictly in 2016. Starting on February 8, online sellers should have started getting Google Shopping Feed errors on products that don’t have the required ‘brand’ and ‘gtin’ status filled in. These are simply a warning letting you know that you should start to look at these items and ensure these missing attributes are showing up in your feed. On May 16, Google reportedly plans to start fully enforcing this rule and will begin to disapprove products in your feed that don’t follow the guidelines. This can cause major headaches for e-tailers who drive a large amount of business through their feeds. Fruition had a client that was hit with the update to product variants. Luckily, we caught it while they were still receiving warnings. Had it resulted in full-on disapprovals, the e-tailer would have missed out on a large amount of traffic and revenue from the suspension of ads. Don’t let yourself get caught unprepared by this update. Google is only going to continue growing this requirement by including more brands. If you’re an online merchant that submits product feeds to Google, be aware and be pro-active at making sure your data and feeds are ready to cope with the coming changes. If you're concerned that you're unprepared, or you begin to see disapproval issues, contact Fruition. It is worth noting that not all products fall under this enforcement and there are some other cases where an e-tailer’s feed might be okay. Products that aren’t new, don’t fall into the brand guidelines, custom made products, antiques and some items of apparel don't have to adhere to the new requirements. Still, the best rule of thumb and the best way to avoid an issue is to submit GTINs with your products if they are at all available. You can find some more information on specifications in some of these related articles:

- 2015 Feed Specification Update
- About Unique Product Identifiers
- Product Feed Specification


Explore the latest stricter Google GTIN rules for Shopping & AdWords. Understand how these changes will impact e-tailers & prepare for your data feeds compliance.

Google GTIN Requirements: Guide to New Rules for Shopping & AdWords

# Get Your E-Comm Site Ready for Summer Shopping Season

E-tailers breathe a sigh of relief after the holiday rush – the crushing wave of shoppers is done, their revenue has climbed, and with proper preparation, foundation and maintenance, their website or mobile app stayed up, functional and fast! Then comes March, and e-commerce companies need to start planning for the spring and summer shopping seasons – the time of Moms, Dads and Grads is quickly approaching. This set of holidays and celebrations centers around personal gift giving, meaning just about every type of e-commerce company can see an uptick in web searches, site traffic and sales. Unlike Valentine’s Day that mainly benefits florists, chocolate shops and jewelry stores, everything is fair game for Moms, Dads and Grads – from grilling accessories to dorm room supplies to home décor. This means all e-tailers should be doing their due diligence in planning and preparing for the next heavy wave of online shopping. To maximize sales and profit during the spring and summer shopping seasons, e-commerce companies need to prepare website infrastructure, marketing campaigns and more.

### Do Your Research
One of the best ways to prepare for an upcoming rush is to look back at what happened in previous high seasons. Check your website analytics to identify when the rush begins and when it peaks. Knowing when your customers shop will help you plan promotions and get your website ready to handle the additional traffic. Also pay attention to what day of the week these surges happened. Did the rush start because it was a week before Mother’s Day or did it start because that happened to be a Saturday (when people had a little more free time to browse online)? While you won’t be able to determine the exact cause from analytics, you should plan for both instances and track your tests so you can enhance your process even further next year. Also pay attention to top selling items last year. These are key items to create special promotions around and feature prominently on your homepage, checkout process and other key areas. Go beyond top sellers from this time last year and identify what items have been your top sellers lately. These items could be trending in general now and promoting them could help you increase sales even more. To really capitalize on today’s hot items, expand your research beyond your own data. Pay attention to “what’s hot” according to popular publications and the items featured on the “Best Gifts for XYZ” (Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, college graduates, etc.) articles that inevitably takeover online this time of year. Knowing all this information will help you create promotions and content that have a better chance of driving sales. Another good thing to research is drop off or abandon points. All e-commerce sites deal to a certain extent with “window shoppers” who load up their digital cart but never hit the Buy button. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try and mitigate site or cart abandon rates. Identify common points your shoppers leave from then investigate further to see if there’s a usability, pricing or some other reason that might be driving them away. If you can correct those issues, you can increase your sales.

### Prepare Technically
An e-tailer’s worst nightmare is their site crashing during a peak shopping period or experiencing a data breach that leaks sensitive consumer information. A strong foundation and continual maintenance and upkeep help guard against these scenarios, but it’s still a good idea to put your site through extra testing and tune-up as you approach a busy season. Work with a software testing company to complete a security audit. You need to make sure network access points, e-commerce transactions and other vital interactions are secure. More traffic is a good thing, unless it slows down or crashes your site. If all your marketing is done properly, you will see a spike in traffic during this upcoming shopping season, so prepare you site for the anticipated additional traffic beforehand. Site speed and bandwidth are two major areas to pay attention to. Today’s consumer has little patience for websites that are slow to load and if your site doesn’t load within a matter of seconds they’ll leave. Page abandonment increases by 25% if you site doesn’t load within four seconds. That metric is from 2011 – imagine the expectations of today’s online shoppers five years later. This higher bounce rate also has a negative impact on your search rankings, so there’s a double benefit to ensuring fast load times and a good user experience. If need be, consider getting a CDN. Finally, walk through the flow of your site and see if there’s anywhere you get frustrated. While there likely isn’t enough time for major site design changes, if there is low hanging fruit that can enhance the user experience make the changes. The same goes for last year’s main drop off points. If people were abandoning their carts because of a cumbersome check out process, see if it can be improved. If changes can’t be made and tested in time, leave the existing process in place through the next high sales season but make plans to address the issue immediately afterwards. This should give you plenty of time to implement a new process without introducing potential issues and bugs during a busy season.

### Plan Your Themes
It’s definitely tempting to try and be everything to everyone, but the ROI of your marketing and sales campaigns will be better if you make focused, well-informed decisions. The nice thing about the spring and summer shopping season is that it’s a bit stretched out, giving you the chance to create campaigns that target each upcoming occasion. While high school and college graduations stretch from May through the end of June, Mother’s Day (in May) and Father’s Day (in June) are set and have limited shopping seasons. Identify what shoppers you’re going after with each campaign and what type of outreach they’re most likely to respond to. Email, landing pages, retargeting ads and social media outreach should all be in your plans. Start by creating landing pages you can drive visitors to from a link on your main page, external links and paid ads. Make these page super theme specific both in appearance and in the “top gifts” you choose to feature. Do keyword research for each campaign and populate the landing pages with keyword and longtail keyword rich content to help your search results (just be sure not to go overboard with the keywords or you could get dinged by Google). Adding related items or “Customers Also Bought” sections on these pages is a great way to appeal to impulse buyers. Now that you have your themes, keywords and promotions outlined, create a blog calendar that includes content that matches up with and promotes these efforts. Consistently creating new content around your target keywords will give you a better chance of being found in search. Be sure to plan some highly shareable content, such as a Top 10 Gift Ideas for Mother’s Day list or an infographic of dorm essentials. This type of content has a better chance of being shared across social media, earning you more eyes and traffic. Remember to ad links to any specific products you highlight within a blog post – you want to make it as easy as possible for a shopper to become a buyer. Once your content is planned out, create a social media calendar for sharing and promoting your specials. This is how you’ll get your sharable content and new promotions seen by even more people, so having a regular posting schedule is important. Hot promotions like holiday sales are also a good time to use social advertising – there are a lot of fun paid social options out there right now that are extra attention grabbing.

### Make It Even Easier to Buy
You’ve already analyzed drop off rates, (hopefully) addressed any difficult usability areas and added similar item call outs to your landing pages, which will all help with conversions. Now it’s time to take the final push-to-buy even further. Extend the “Customers Also Bought” items to the cart and checkout pages to encourage a few more impulse buys. Also consider special promotions like free shipping. Many shoppers abandon carts because of unexpectedly high shipping costs – if you can eliminate this issue during the peak of your sales season you can encourage more sales. If you don’t want to do away with shipping costs altogether, consider offering free shipping on orders over a certain amount or put out ads with a promo code for free shipping or a percentage off. Additional promotions like these can give buyers that last little push they need. If you’re ready to take your promotional and marketing efforts to the next level, implement personalized offers. If you have cookies enabled on your website and know a user keeps returning to look at a specific item, showcase that item on your homepage the next time they visit or send them an email about it. If you know a user is shopping from an iPhone or iPad, surface offers and items that highlight iPhone accessories. Personalization possibilities are worth exploring during times when people are already driven to buy – like when they’re shopping for a gift for mom, dad or the grad in their life.


Prepare your ecommerce site for success this spring and summer shopping season. Necessitate your due diligence in strategic planning and preparation for increased online shopping demands.

Ready Your E-Commerce Site for a Profitable Summer Shopping Season

# Your Guide to Selling Online with WooCommerce

These days, retailers can’t afford to not sell online. You need to get your products where your customers are, and that’s on their screens. But getting into eCommerce is no small feat, and finding the right software to power your store is an important decision.

## WooCommerce Experts Guide
The ecommerce experts at Fruition recommend WooCommerce for businesses that are already using WordPress to power their websites and are ready to start selling on their own online marketplace. WooCommerce is a free, open-source eCommerce solution that’s built on top of Wordpress. It’s technically a Wordpress plug-in and was released in 2011 to add eCommerce capabilities directly to a WordPress website.

## WooCommerce Can Automate Most of your Ecommerce Operations
WooCommerce offers all the features you’d expect from a robust ecommerce Platform. In fact, 21% of eCommerce stores today are powered by WooCommerce, and that’s no accident. WooCommerce has a ton of great features. For starters, it’s easy to use, supports 100+ payment gateways, automates sales tax, simplifies shipping and fulfillment, and can be used to sell just about anything.

## Robust Features of WooCommerce
If you’re considering adding ecommerce capabilities to your site or want to explore updating your current store, the Fruition team can get you started. We regularly help our clients build eCommerce sites from scratch, integrate WooCommerce into existing websites, and maintain, optimize, and add features to existing WooCommerce stores. We can help you make the right decision for your customers and get your store where it needs to be: in front of the right customers.

Let's discuss WooCommerce for your business

Unlock eCommerce potential with our WooCommerce guide, ideal for WordPress site owners ready to enter the online selling market.

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Quick Guide to Start Your Online Store with WooCommerce

# How To Grow Your Email List Organically

Email marketing helps you raise awareness and keep your products and services top-of-mind for your subscribers. But since the average email list naturally degrades by about 22.5% every year, it’s becoming more and more important to proactively grow your list.    But, how do you get your emails into the right inboxes and increase subscribers? For many companies, the easy way out is to simply purchase a list to build your numbers back up.  Let us be the first to tell you - this is a bad idea. A purchased list will give you a short term lift in subscribers, but your deliverability will almost certainly drop. If you need help configuring your long SPF records follow this guide. Plus, you could hurt your IP reputation, which could stop active subscribers from receiving your content since your emails will bounce or be directed to spam folders. So, how can you build your list with actively opted-in and engaged subscribers? Let us count the ways.  

## Incentivize Opt-In Messaging   
Give your audience a reason to subscribe to your email lists. Offering discounts, like a flat rate or a percentage off a purchase is a good way to do this, but incentivizing your audience to opt-in doesn’t have to break the bank.  Appeal to your audience’s desire to know what’s going on by using calls to action (CTAs) that encourage them to stay in the loop. Or, use gated content to gain subscribers. Asking website visitors to sign up for a free copy of a whitepaper or ebook can help you show your value to consumers and spread your message. 

## Use Sign-Up Forms On Your Website 
If visitors are on your website, chances are they’re interested in what you do. Capture them at this stage by using a pop-up or footer sign-up form. To get the most out of your form, follow these tips: 
- **Keep it simple!** Asking too much of visitors will make them less likely to sign up. 
- **Add a subscribe checkbox on eCommerce checkout pages.** These bottom-of-the-funnel users are more likely to sign up for email.  
- **Create a preference center landing page.**  A well set-up preference center page gives subscribers the opportunity to get more of the emails they love and less of the ones they don’t. Having specific options lets your users customize their experience with you, which increases the chances that they’ll stay subscribed.  
- **Don’t pre-check the opt-in box.** It may be tempting to pre-check the box, but by doing so, you’re opening yourself up to a whole lot of people who will hit the “unsubscribe” button. Adding a smaller number of high-quality subscribers will be more valuable to your business in the long run than adding a bunch of users who aren’t that interested.

## Utilize Your Other Platforms 
Having strong website CTAs and an intuitive preference center will boost your subscriber list, but don’t rely solely on your website. A well rounded marketing strategy uses every platform you have, and building your email list is no different. Use social media to promote contests and giveaways that involve a subscriber signing up for emails. Add a sign-up CTA on your Facebook page, and tease gated content on Pinterest or Instagram.  You can even use YouTube end cards to encourage viewers to subscribe to your newsletter.   

## Have Great Content 
Once you have subscribers, the best way to keep them is having great content. Great content will vary widely by industry and audience personas, but focus on making your content engaging and shareable. If your current audience loves the content you’re sending them and it’s easy to share, they’re more likely to forward it on to new potential subscribers.  

## Lets Grow your Email Lists
Could your email marketing use a boost? Let’s explore your options and grow your audience! 



Discover proven strategies for organically growing your email list. Our guide empowers you with the knowledge to build a strong, engaged subscriber base.

Strategy & Research

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Chance Carlin

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More articles by Chance Carlin

Optimizing FedEx DIM Weight in Magento - Solutions by Fruition

Generating Product Variants for Google Shopping Feeds - E-Commerce

Google GTIN Requirements: Guide to New Rules for Shopping & AdWords

Ready Your E-Commerce Site for a Profitable Summer Shopping Season

Quick Guide to Start Your Online Store with WooCommerce

Successful Email List Building: Strategies to Naturally Foster Subscriber Growth