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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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.