Can these strategies be implemented with Merchant Optimizer or should I stop using MO

[William Davis]

PHOSPHOR Media - Merchant Optimizer (MO) module is a good product ?it does everything it advertises. But I do not know if the following strategies can be implemented using MO in order to preserve existing category/product links (i.e.: www.store.com/directory/product_code.html): (http://www.store.com/directory/product_code.html):)

Related Products (Viking Coders - Related Products From Purchase History or better)
Featured Items (Viking Coders ? Top Selling Products or better)
Recently Viewed Items (Viking Coders - TinyCart and History Helper or better)If the above strategies cannot be implemented using MO, what steps if any can be taken to either preserve existing category/product links or redirect same to friendly URL?

Applicable Current Store Setup:

MM: v4.24 / MVM: v4.1400
OpenUI: [4.955/4.955/4.955/4.984]
Viking Coders - Product Page Templates
PHOSPHOR Media - Merchant Optimizer
Viking Coders - TinyCart and History Helper

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Tiny cart will not work because it requires dynamic content that is customer-specific to appear on all pages. Of course, having that content on all pages would mean Merchant would have to be called for every request so performance gains from Optimizer could be negated. Susan Petracco of http://www.netblazon.com may be able to help you with an alternative; she has implemented AJAX technology into Optimizer stores where there's not a tiny cart but there is a link that will tell the person at all times that they have X number of items in their basket and provide a link to the real basket screen. This is fairly low overhead since she's pulling a low-intensity Merchant URL to get that data rather than a full product or other page.

Related products work fine with optimizer, but you have to remember to regenerate your pages if you change them since Optimizer will not pick up the fact that you changed those. Related products from purchase history will not work since that's dynamic data that changes quite often as purchases are made. Top selling products would probably work but you'd have to renegerate your pages regularly to keep them up to date; or if you only put it on your storefront page, you could just regenerate that one regularly.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

I'm not sure what Susan is doing with the Ajax portion of integrating TinyCart helper, but their is a section in using an Iframe with tiny cart in Optimizer's recent documentation. Because of the way TinyCart is setup, the Iframe makes on call to a specific module so the load is not as great pulling the whole cart. Otherwise...what he said.

[William Davis]

I'm not sure what Susan is doing with the Ajax portion of integrating TinyCart helper, but their is a section in using an Iframe with tiny cart in Optimizer's recent documentation. Because of the way TinyCart is setup, the Iframe makes on call to a specific module so the load is not as great pulling the whole cart. Otherwise...what he said.

We currently use TinyCart with IFrame -I did not know I could do visite items as well -Thanks!

What about the other two strategies -what do you suggest?

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Same as what David said. Since those features are based on a "collection" of responses rather than a single response, you will not see much difference between a completely dynamic display, and one that is say updated daily or even weekly.

[leslienord]

Also if you want your "home" page to reflect these updates I would suggest letting MO create to index.html - that would also eliminate the need to constantly redo the index.html page to reflect the store front updates.

Question to the developers could these features also be implemented via iframe (even though it somewhat negates the use of static pages)

Viking Coders - Related Products From Purchase History
Viking Coders ? Top Selling Products
Viking Coders - TinyCart and History Helper (Tiny Cart as noted is already using iframes)

How would all this pulling of dynamic content via iframes effect the load/speed of the site?

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

I know Tiny Cart can be...and I *THINK* i remember doing this with Top Selling, but a lot of Viking modules can be since they structure them so that one only has to configure the Iframe URL to call a single function inside the module. (Caveat, make sure its on a good host...some mega-hosts do not set the module permissions correctly so that the modules can be callled directly.)

As for speed, yes, it will slow down the page load since it has to do extra work. Not as much as loading the entire Merchant application, but it is additional. Personally, I wouldn't do top selling and related...because these features are cumlative...they really don't change with every shopper, and for most sites, a weekly update (via Optimizer for example) would be more than sufficiant.