Ecommerce website: Product page setup & SKU's

[DHS_SH]

I manage an E-commerce website and we are looking to make some changes to our product pages to try and optimise them for search purposes and to try and improve the customer buying experience.

This is where my head starts to hurt!

Now, let's say I am selling a T shirt that comes in 4 sizes and 6 different colours. At the moment my website would have 24 products, each with pretty much the same content (maybe differing references to the colour & size).

My idea is to change this and have 1 main product page for the T-shirt, but to have 24 product SKU's/variations that exist to give the exact product details. Some different ways I have been considering to do this:

a) have drop-down fields on the product page that ask the customer to select their Tshirt size and colour. The image & price then changes on the page.

b) All product 24 product SKUs sre listed under the main product with the 'Add to Cart' open next to each one. Each one would be clickable so a page it its own right.

Would I need to set up a canonical links for each SKU that point to the top level product page?

I'm obviously looking to minimise duplicate content but Im not exactly sure on how to set this up - its a big decision so I need to be 100% clear before signing off on anything. .

Any other tips on how to do this or examples of good e-commerce websites that use product SKus well?

Kind regards

Tom

[Keszi]

Hi Tom,

What I would do is that I would use the same url and different parameter for the SKU-s.

I will point out an example:

www.example.com/cat/t-shirt.html?sku=skunumber

on the product page you would have a canonical link to: www.example.com/cat/t-shirt.html

I hope that helped,

Istvan

[DHS_SH]

Thanks Istvan - so what would the customer be looking at when they view the SKU URL?

Is the image & text completely different or would you just change the picture & price (if applicable)...hope my question makes sense!

[Keszi]

Hi Tom,

I would only change the picture and the price (if applicable). The text could also change is some proportion (for example the size description, color description, etc).

Gr.,

Istvan

[DHS_SH]

Ok great - thanks for the great advice!

[DHS_SH]

1 follow up question....do you know how this would work with regards to Google Shopping / Base?

If I followed the approach you have suggested would I be able to add each SKU as an individual item within Google shopping (ie. large red t-shirt,  medium red t-shirt, yellow medium t-shirt etc.) or would I only be able to promote the product page itself (containing all 24 SKUs - for example)?

[Keszi]

I am not 100% sure, but I think with this case you could only use the product page itself.

I need to digg into this a littlebit more before giving you an accurate answer.

[DHS_SH]

Thanks Istvan.

I've just spoken to Google help via their online Adwords Chat function (good tip there!) and they have provided me with information about setting up your products so that the SKUs are displayed depending on the terms the searcher uses:

http://support.google.com/merchants/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=188494#other

For reference, you basically tag your 1 product page up and tell in the data feed within Google Merchant - this will in turn tell Google which variant URL to show to the browser based on things such as size, colour, weight etc. et.c

[Keszi]

Ah cool! I am glad it has worked out.