E-Commerce Copywriting: The Guide to Selling More

Smashing magazine have published this article.

"Quality product descriptions can transform e-commerce conversion rates — it’s common to see increases of 30-100%. As well as converting more visitors, search traffic increases drastically when unique copy is written for each product. Most online retailers use manufacturers’ copy or rely solely on images to sell products. They then use inadequate copy elsewhere on their site and fail to achieve a consistent tone to persuade their audience. This creates a compelling opportunity for savvy retailers — by writing quality e-commerce copy you will create a unique competitive advantage."

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/12/20/ecommerce-copywriting-the-ultimate-guide-to-selling-more/

C# Serialization including Namespaces for Google Products

All C# developers know that Serialization can be a pain at the best of times, and it is especially painful if you want to do something out of the "ordinary"!!!

I had a problem when creating a nice little solution for RSS feeds to advertise store products on Google products...

The concept is very simple, Google extended the RSS standard so they could have their own elements (g:condition, g:price..) etc, etc...

I created the class definitions for the RSS classes, RSS, Channel, Item.  Being the anal developer I am, I obviously wanted to keep the property casing correct so added the [XmlElement("")] attributes to them so the serialized version would be to Google's liking and we would both be happy!

For the serialization, I added the Google RSS namespace which was pretty simple using the XmlSerializerNamespaces class... but this is where I realised I'd never had to serialize a class using namespace prefixes before...

I scanned Google and several coding sites for some guidance but I struggled to find anything that would help me out, after a nice cup of English breakfast tea and a chat with The Bizzle, I had another crack at examining the aforementioned [XmlElement] attribute...

This turned up a property called "Namespace", seeing this did bring a little happiness to my afternoon and after extending my existing definitions to include the Google namespace, ran a quick serialization test and to my delight, ta daaaaa! prefixed elements :)

So, the bit you have all been waiting for:

[XmlElement(ElementName = "condition", Namespace = "http://base.google.com/ns/1.0")]

public string Condition { get; set; }

Producing this result:

<g:condition>new</g:condition>

I hope this helps one of you guys, if not then it's something to blog about :)

Ta Ta for now!

Kev