The Blog

Amazon deposits can be difficult to reconcile in NetSuite because there aren’t easy ways to match up the transactions in the Amazon file with the orders in NetSuite. Manually trying to match up orders is time-consuming and error-prone. To alleviate the manual effort, increase productivity, and improve accuracy, an automated solution is required. Fourth Wave Consulting customers were struggling with the manual process of reconciling Amazon deposits, so we developed a custom solution to help.

BatchIt is the custom solution Fourth Wave Consulting developed. This process records the payments and credit refunds within NetSuite,

Netsuite 2020.2 is just around the corner, and as per usual, it brings with it a plethora of improvements, upgrades & new features, and nuances. In this article post, we will go over some of the biggest features and updates to be both excited and wary of with the release of 2020.2. We got you covered on how to prepare to ensure your business is ready for this new release and minimize any downtime.

The time it takes to load a web page is called the page download speed, or load time. Your site's average load time is an important factor in Google's site ranking algorithm. Web users expect pages to load quickly, and pages with longer load times tend to have higher bounce rates, and those sites are seen as less important. For more information on the effect of site performance and organic rankings and conversion, see Cloudflares article on Website Performance and Conversation Rates (https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/performance/more/website-performance-conversion-rates/).

To measure site speed, Google released a SEO tool called Lighthouse back in 2018 that offers some insight on the performance of your website and its pages. This audit gives a mobile and desktop score across four areas: Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO. For the sake of this article, we will be focusing on solely the "Performance" category of the testing and its associated fixes. So, let's dive in!

A brief history of promotions in NetSuite:

1. Standard Promotions were the only option at first, allowing basic promotions to be created and offered in Site Builder or phone orders like a % off coupon code. This functionality is pretty basic.
2. In 2014, NetSuite released a SuiteBundle (a free package that users could install in their account) to support more types of promotions - line level promos allowing a single item to ship free, order based criteria, and things like Buy X, get Y free. This new functionality was welcomed and supported Site Builder.

Existing Functionality to be Preserved Until at Least 2022

A brief history of promotions in NetSuite:

1. Standard Promotions were the only option at first, allowing basic promotions to be created and offered in Site Builder or phone orders like a % off coupon code. This functionality is pretty basic.
2. In 2014, NetSuite released a SuiteBundle (a free package that users could install in their account) to support more types of promotions - line level promos allowing a single item to ship free, order based criteria, and things like Buy X, get Y free. This new functionality was welcomed and supported Site Builder.
3. Around 2017, NetSuite began offering a new feature called SuitePromotions (https://developers.suitecommerce.com/section4737596252), with lots of new functionality:
   • Stackable Promotions
   • Auto-Apply Promotions
   • Best Offer
   • Cached Saved Searches
   • Audit and Visibility
   • Automatically Add Free Gift to the Transaction

The new feature is not compatible with the previous promotions - You can have both active in your system, but could only apply either a SuitePromotion or one of the others to an order, not both. The other major downside is that SuitePromotions can't be used on Site Builder, where the vast majority of NetSuite companies host their sites.

1. In November 2019, NetSuite announced that they will be removing standard and advanced promotions completely.

As a site owner, marketer, or developer you are well accustomed to seeing fake or bot form submissions, which can be quite an annoyance and potentially time intensive depending on the severity. Luckily there are proven, modern solutions to this sort of problem: form captchas. There are many types of captchas but in the basic sense; a captcha test is designed to determine if an online user is really a human and not a bot. The most popular captcha is reCAPTCHA by Google. reCAPTCHA is a free service from Google that helps protect websites from spam and abuse. A “CAPTCHA” is a Turing test to tell human and bots apart. It is easy for humans to solve, but hard for “bots” and other malicious software to figure out. You may recall older (v1) versions o the reCAPTCHA looking something like this:

Before we get into more detail, you should probably be asking yourself why you would even care about microdata as a business owner, the answer is - Rich Snippets & Google Shopping.

By adding hidden microdata tags to your pages, products and other entities of your site, you make them more attractive to the user in Google search. For example, a regular search snippet looks like this:

Responsive design in a nutshell is when your site automatically fits within the user’s device. Thus, if the user has a small screen (width-wise), the elements will rearrange to show you what really matters (CTA buttons, other actionable items). You’ll often see bigger buttons, more blank space between the various web elements in hopes to avoid accidental user actions, smaller font-sizes, etc.

In June, Apple introduced Intelligent Tracking Prevention (https://marketingland.com/wwdc-safari-will-block-third-party-trackers-following-users-around-web-216734), a major change to the way Safari handles third party cookies, which is the main way advertising companies gather data about users. The main goal is to limit the ability of large data mining companies to build extensive web history for all users using hidden tags that they don't even know about. ITP mostly targets pervasive retargeting practices rather than disrupting advertisers’ ability to track ad campaign performance. In my opinion, this is a good thing for users, although it also reinforces the near monopoly of online ad market share for Google and Facebook. Due to the change, there are specific consequences for NetSuite websites.

Why Secure Your Entire Site? When you view a webpage, that information passes through a dozen or more servers to get to you. If that URL starts with https://, anyone in the path can view or even modify the contents of the page. ISPs insert their own ads in web pages, can now legally track & sell your browsing history, and many governments around the world collect massive troves of browsing data. Securing your entire site (instead of just the checkout portion) is now considered a very good thing to do for your users. It's nearly impossible for a 'man in the middle' to extract or change information on secure pages. It's a win for the user. Here is a more detailed explanation of HTTP vs HTTPS (https://ahrefs.com/blog/http-vs-https-for-seo/) if you want more background.

An XML sitemap is a computer and human readable file that website owners can choose to place on their site to improve the indexing of their pages. Before any page on your site can rank for organic traffic, it must first be indexed by the search engine. Normally, a search engine spider will go to your homepage, and follow links on each page it visits to index as many pages as it can on your website, according to your link authority (a measure of the number & quality of links pointing to your site). The more link authority your site has, the more resources a search engine is willing to invest in indexing your pages.
Search engines support reading a XML site map to add to its list of pages to index. In addition, we can provide other important details to the search engine spider, like how often a page is updated, when it was last updated, and details about any images we want indexed as well. Providing a complete and properly formatted XML site map is considered a basic requirement by many SEOs, and will go a long way towards getting the vast majority of your pages indexed.

There has been a tectonic shift in the way people are viewing your website. Have you noticed it? Several years ago, your site traffic was mostly from desktop computers. Today, a significant percentage of visitors are probably arriving via mobile devices. That should come as no big surprise, given the meteoric rise of smart phones and tablets. And let's face it, any traffic is good, regardless of how they got there - but only if they're converting to customers. The problem for most sites is that they're not, at least not nearly as well as desktop visitors.

Fortunately, there's a fix.

For most NetSuite customers, the 2016.1 update is about 1 to 2 months away. If you don't frequent the NetSuite user group (https://usergroup.netsuite.com/users/index.php), you may be surprised to learn that some significant areas of functionality are being discontinued in favor of a new method. If you use NetSuite to send emails and automated or semi-automated fashion, you will need to be using the new system when you are upgraded to avoid problems. The only announcement of this change I could find is in this thread in the NetSuite User Group (https://usergroup.netsuite.com/users/forum/product-areas/sales-marketing-support-service/366985-use-of-crmsdk-tags-will-be-completely-deprecated-with-version-2015-release-2) (login required).

I have been working with NetSuite since 2004, with much of my time spent on building and optimizing websites in their site builder platform (Now called SuiteCommerce Site Builder). In those 11 years, almost nothing has changed, and none of the many bugs I have personally submitted have ever been addressed. From what I can tell, at least 90% of NetSuite companies that have a website are running on site builder, which costs around $12k per year. The only other platform NetSuite offers is the new SuiteCommerce Advanced, which is 3 times as much and requires a great deal of highly complex code to be written in order to actually launch a website. Since most NetSuite companies can't afford a six-figure website, I have put together this list of bugs and shortcomings that I have come across, specifically about the web site categories (this post would be a book if I tried to list all of the site builder related issues I've found). Hopefully it will spare you some of the frustration I have had in discovering these the hard way. I have tried submitting bugs for most of these, but NetSuite support mostly tells me they are 'enhancement requests', which have never been addressed.

The most noticeable benefit to being a trusted store is the addition of a floating badge that is displayed in the bottom right corner of every page on your site. Here is an example:

Why Install Universal Analytics?

• Better user identification across multiple devices - get closer to tracking users, not just visits.
• For the first time, you can now track off-line conversions with the measurement protocol (https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/) - trackable lifetime value in your web analytics!
• All future analytics innovations will rollout to universal analytics.
• Custom variables become custom dimensions (https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/platform/customdimsmets), and are easier to implement and more powerful.
• Set your own campaign and session timeout values (https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2795871)
• It can run alongside your existing analytics - it can be very helpful to have six months or more to compare between systems, as no two systems will ever match exactly in their reporting.

Prerequisites for This Guide

Please see my note (#note) about issues with the auto linker in NetSuite.
This guide is written for NetSuite SuiteCommerce Advanced and Site Builder websites. It assumes that you use the NetSuite checkout domain (checkout.netsuite.com or similar) as well as the default checkout process. If you have a custom checkout domain or use the reference cart/checkout or SSP checkout, you will need a different solution.

One of the features I like about the NetSuite SuiteCommerce web store is the related item functionality. Not only can you hand pick related items to display on product pages, but you can also allow NetSuite to automatically generate recommendations based on sales history. NetSuite includes four sample related item layouts, but they don't handle varying sized images very well and tend to take up a lot of space, so I developed an alternative layout that solves some of those problems.

A Better Related Item Layout

Here's what you can expect from the new layout:

The Problem: big brands are dominating search results pages (SERPs)

One of the most common complaints coming from SEOs and webmasters over the last few months has been about big brands taking over search results pages. Various (https://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/biggest-online-retail-brands-dominate-serps-463208.html) webmaster and SEO forums (https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4589243.htm) have threads on the topic, and the Internet retailer 2013 search marketing guide (https://www.internetretailer.com/2012/11/01/new-world-order-natural-search) had this to say (emphasis mine):

With the implementation of Google Panda in February 2011 and Penguin in May 2012, Google changed its search engine algorithm to lower the rankings of web retailers whose sites featured static and generic content available on many other sites. Moving up under the new rules are retailers that offer detailed content, such as unique product descriptions and images, are smart at using reams of customer information to create content that appeals to shoppers looking for a specific brand or SKU, or that bring original content to their web sites in the form of consumer reviews and other content drawn from online social networks.



The biggest retailing brands tended to be the winners from these changes, and that shows up in their dominance of the natural search rankings in the new 2013 Internet Retailer Search Engine Marketing Guide.

Big brands have bigger signals

If you think about it from the search engine's point of view, it's not that hard to understand why big brands like Amazon, Sears, or eBay would have an easy time ranking well.

What is SEO and why should I care?
While most website owners are familiar with the concept of search engine optimization (SEO), most that I have spoken to have an incomplete view of what it can do and its importance overall.

The 404 Report

One feature lacking in most hosted analytics systems like Google analytics is a 404 report - i.e. a list of URLs that a user or search engine tried to access, but the page was not available. If you have a NetSuite Site Builder site (now call SuiteCommerce Site Builder), NetSuite provides a built-in report that you can customize just for this purpose.

What Good is a 404 Report?

EDIT: NetSuite no longer offers a free SDN membership.

I've been using NetSuite since 2004, and have long wished to have a simple test account that I could do anything I wanted in. As far as I know, here are the major ways that one can get a test or sandbox account with NetSuite:

Power Reviews (now BazaarVoice) allows websites to add product reviews for each item. One of the best side benefits of adding reviews to your site is the user generated content, which is rich with long tail keywords (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail) that users are searching with to find your products. The typical methodfor enabling search engine friendly reviews with Power Reviews is called their 'in-line SEO' solution. Unfortunately NetSuite companies haven't been able to implement the solution due to limitations within the NetSuite platform. Fourth Wave Consulting has developed a fully automated solution that works around these limitations, and provides the full SEO benefits.

Ever since there have been search engines, search engine optimizers (SEOs) have tried various tactics to rank well - often straying into deceptive or 'black hat' techniques like auto generated content, websites, and link networks. As search engines have gotten better at detecting these spammy techniques, the spammers have gotten more clever. The latest major change on the Google side began in April 2012, with the Penguin update.

One of the best features of the NetSuite ERP system is its all-encompassing nature. It's possible to run every department of your company in NetSuite, which means that your NetSuite administrator has many choices when it comes to optimizing the system. How do you decide between improving customer service case handling versus a smoother estimate/quoting system for sales versus a faster shipping process in the warehouse? There are many NetSuite customizations or automation projects that hold the promise of a significant benefit for your company. By using some straightforward formulas, it's possible to estimate the return for a number of different projects, which can make prioritization much easier.

10 Questions to Ask a Potential NetSuite Consulting Partner

NetSuite is the world's most successful software as a service (SaaS) ERP system, and has been built to be as flexible as possible for as many types of businesses as they can. As a result, NetSuite is a powerful platform that can automate many business processes and run companies efficiently. Out-of-the-box, however, NetSuite is not particularly well set up for any specific company, and a great deal of customization is required to get the most out of NetSuite.

One thing that many NetSuite customers struggle with is the ability to set up a proper staging environment so they can test things before they launch them on their website. There are three ways that I know of to test out new changes on a NetSuite template driven e-commerce site, and I will go through the pros and cons of each.

Two distinct but similar concepts that are important to understand, and easy to get wrong. SEO basically boils down to sending search engines the signals that they like, so every website owner should strive to ensure they are handling canonical and duplicate content issues properly.

I will detail some of the issues that can come up along with my recommendation for handling it.

One thing I have found to be true with almost every company I have worked with that has been on NetSuite for a while is that saved searches tend to proliferate, and can become a big inefficient mess that is hard to deal with. Here are the best strategies I have found for managing a big list of saved searches:

1. 1. Use a company–wide naming convention for all saved searches to make them easier to sort. Naming convention guidelines:
      1. Avoid using a colon (:) in the saved search name as that can cause problems with the global search
      2. Use NetSuite's pagination to your advantage - you can reorder A search by clicking on a column,, so maybe have one person create all the saved searches for their department so you can sort by owner.
      3. By default, saved searches will be sorted by name - use a person's initials or department code at the beginning of the name for each saved search for that department.
      4. As of this writing, there is no way to set up a search portlet for saved searches, but the global search does work on saved search names. If you are consistent in the way you name searches, you can reuse some of the words later on in a global search to find just the relevant searches. For example, use 'KPI' in all saved searches that source a KPI, and you can then do a global search for KPI to find them all.
   2. Pruning – saved searches tend to multiply a number like hangers in a closet, so set yourself a regular tasks to go through your saved searches once a month and remove any that might have been created during testing, or are no longer used. Administrators can check a box to show all private searches, and they can clean up on others' behalf. You can sort saved searches by who or when they were last run, inactivating the older ones. If this causes a problem, it's easy to reactivate the search.

Product pages. For most Internet retailers, these are the most numerous pages on their site, and a perfect place to optimize for long tail keywords. In this guide, I will cover the options within NetSuite's template driven e-commerce platform for optimizing product pages for search engines, and give the pros and cons of those choices.

Now that Google Analytics (https://www.google.com/analytics/) is available to anyone with a website for free, it's possible to bring an entirely new level of data-driven analysis to ongoing SEO efforts. This guide assumes that you have a basic understanding of analytics concepts and a functional web analytics platform that tracks conversion data that can tie back to the original source ( one of the most basic features). It doesn't have to be Google Analytics, but my examples will use their reports.

This work is the product of years of research and months in the writing. It's an attempt to give a high-level overview of all the relevant pieces of the economic situation this country finds itself in. Most of the ideas have been gleaned from experts far more knowledgable than myself - I'm not an economist. These are simply the most important ideas and facts I've come across in my extensive reading about the current situation over the last nearly two years. None of these facts are a secret, nor have they come to light recently. Much of what legislators claim to be surprised about has been known for nearly two years.

Troubleshooting: in computers, no one can go very long without being forced to do at least rudimentary attempts, but I've found few books or other resources that help teach the mental process. After almost two decades of working with computers, since my first IBM XT at the ripe age of 15, I've been dealing with problems of every type. Most of the computer jobs had a large helping of troubleshooting, which was great for me. It's something I've always enjoyed. I thought I would take the opportunity of my girlfriend's hard drive crashing to walk through one real-world example, and hopefully provide some insight into this sometimes archaic process.

The Symptoms

So the other day my girlfriend tells me her pc has been locking up at odd times. It's one she built herself a couple years ago, and has been running well for that time. I asked her what kind of lock-ups they were; typically hardware failures cause things like an instant reboot or power off, or the entire screen locking up and being completely unresponsive. That's a 'hard lock'.

As with any web hosted environment, response time and performance are a major issue. I would say the entire SAAS industry (software as a service) will have to deal with this problem for the foreseeable future. Only Google seems to have figured out how to provide consistently speedy web hosted applications, and they couldn't do it without their hundreds of thousands of servers. For those mortal companies who have somewhat less than that, performance will always be a major issue.

I remember the first time I heard this phrase - I was in fourth grade and one of the older classes in my school put on a play that in retrospect was completely ridiculous and silly, but I wasn't quite as critical when I was 9. It was a series of scenes designed to exemplify the law of GIGO: garbage in / garbage out. The scenes got more obvious until they finally explained the whole thing in a terrible song & dance number at the end so even the slow kids could get it (I didn't get it myself until I heard the song).

As a Netsuite customer and consultant, I'm surprised that I've never heard talk of Netsuite's IPO plans. In all the usergroup posts and official Netsuite notifications, nothing has ever been mentioned, which strikes me as strange. Maybe it's not, who knows.

One of the best features of having a database-driven e-commerce site is that there is one centralized place to store all your product information. You can then manipulate the data in all sorts of ways, and all of these applications can be updated in more or less automated fashions, integrating all the changes you've made to your one central source. Some examples:

So what is information architecture and why should you care about it? In simple terms, it's the way you organize the information on your web site. The decisions you make when deciding how your users will navigation your site have far-reaching effects, including SEO, usability, and conversion rate. I've written a lengthy introduction to information architecture concepts. (https://www.fourthwc.com/seo/information-architecture/2006/03/information-architecture-an-introduction.html) I will now go into the process of building your site's structure.

One of my favorite topics in web site design is information architecture. That's a fancy term that basically corresponds to how you organize the content and navigation for your site. In other words, the method by which you put your content into groups or categories, and thereby build the site's navigation structure. It's a question you can consider at any time in your web site's life, but it really pays to figure it out up front. Having to change the structure of a site that's already running presents a number of challenges that are best avoided. I'll start by introducing the concepts, then in my next article I will walk you through the process.

So what are canonical URLs? Due to a number of factors, it's possible to display the exact same page on some sites with a bunch of different URLs - this situation causes its own host of problems that search engines have to deal with. They attempt to solve it by figuring out what the canonical, or master URL for a page is. This way they can filter out all the other pages that have exactly (or nearly) the same content, and provide better results for their users. There is an excellent write up by Google web guy Matt Cutts on his web site (https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/)

One reality that every computer user has to face is the need for a good anti-virus client for their machine. Almost everyone gets online or shares files with someone, and that opens the door for viruses. It used to be that viruses would rewrite your motherboard's BIOS or delete data, but nowadays the vast majority of viruses just want to replicate themselves and install adware. So the good news is many viruses won't really hurt your computer much. The bad news is that they are very good at propagating around the 'net, and you can expect to come across virus-infected files in email and on web sites quite regularly, especially once you've got on a few spam lists.

One of the great features of Netsuite (www.netsuite.com) is that they provide custom tags to include in the HTML code of the customizations to their site templates. It's pretty flexible for the most part, but they often generate ugly HTML and an inflexible visual appearance. One good example of this is the <%=getGlobalSearchHtml()%> tag.

One of the weaknesses of ASP hosted E-Commerce system Netsuite (https://www.netsuite.com) is that there's no way to access statistics on users who are searching on your site (note this is different than a user searching in a search engine and landing on your site). They will eventually implement it, which is good for the following reasons:

For those who don't know, Netsuite (https://www.netsuite.com) is a hosted, ASP model ERP solution - you can manage your entire site and back-end inventory and accounting with one package, all through your browser. I spend a lot of time with their system, and will be posting on occasion tutorials, reivews, complaints and praise.
Google Analytics (https://analytics.google.com) is actually Urchin web stats, which Google bought and retooled. They started offering it free in late 2005, and it's comparable in power and usability to some very expensive packages. I highly recommend it.

Much of this can be applied to any type of site, but my focus will be specific to E-Commerce web sites. I've never put these concepts down on paper before, so I will likely be making changes over time as I refine my ideas. I believe this list covers the essentials to E-Commerce success - if any of these areas are weak, it will affect the others and the ultimate success of your site.

This article is written for a web-savvy user who is interested in optimizing their Netsuite hosted E-Commerce site for better placement in search engines' natural search engine results pages (SERPs). It assumes a good deal of knowledge about Internet basics, but anyone actively involved on the technical side of a Netsuite store should be familiar with the terms and concepts I use. If you have any questions, please feel free to let me know.

Never one to be caught off-guard a couple of years too late, it's high time I hopped on the blogging bandwagon. I'm pretty sure I'm the last person on the planet to start one, so I'll turn out the lights when I'm done.