This morning at 10:46AM EST your website was dramatically improved. It’s faster, it’s easier to find parts, messages are more clear, and it’s better optimized for SEO. You’re going to sell even more parts.

What’s New (Quickly)

We’ve made changes that are sure to help your customers find the parts they are looking for as quickly as possible.

• All product listing pages have been optimized.
• Product listing pages can be filtered by category, brand, and/or vehicle.
• You can share a link to a specific vehicle (see all parts for a 2013 BRZ).
• You can share a link to filtered parts for a specific vehicle (see all coilover systems for a 2013 BRZ, or see all TEIN coilover systems for a 2013 BRZ).
• All page <title> tags and <h1> tags have been optimized for better SEO.
• Your customer has more prompts to select a vehicle.
• Universal parts are shown higher on the page.
• If a part is not available for the selected vehicle, we provide a link to parts that do fit.
• All messages have been rewritten to be more clear and helpful.
• Oh yeah, it’s about 30% faster!

The Highlights

Parent Category Page

This page has long been the bane of Matt’s existence and today we replaced it with a much better version.

Gone is the all-text page with links to subcategories. In it’s place we show all the product groups within that category with filters on the left to narrow by subcategory, brand, and vehicle. Once you start filtering, you can also remove the filters to see more parts.

Link to Vehicle & Improved Page

You may now select and link to a particular vehicle with a SEO Friendly URL like http://demo.rpmware.com/2013_subaru_brz_limited_4cyl_20l/a-1504929.aspx.

On top of that we’ve replaced the old vehicle page with a new one that gets your customers right to the parts.

New Grid Layout

One of the easiest ways to get customers to the parts more quickly is to put more parts on the page. We didn’t add any extra parts to the page, but we replace the old list-style layout with a new grid layout to get more products to the top of the page. In the old version I could see 5 parts before having to scroll. In the new one I can see 16!

More Prompts to Select a Vehicle

When your customer lands on a product page without selecting a vehicle, your site will prompt him to select his car.

Once, he does we’ll send him right to the part he needs or show a list of available parts when there is more than one.

Fewer Dead Ends

If you customer is looking at a product, selects a vehicle, and finds out it won’t fit your site now shows a link to parts that will fit his vehicle.

Optimized Titles

All page <title> tags and <h1> tags have been optimized for better SEO. They update based on which page the customer is browsing and what filters are selected.

Other Improvements

• We revised all the messages your customers see while browsing for parts to be more clear and helpful.
• After selecting a vehicle, universal parts are hidden by default with a more prominent message to show them.
• Universal parts are shown higher on the page.
• We’re speed freaks. We sped things up by about 30%.

Google recently sent out an alarming messages to thousands of its Webmaster Tools users. If you received an email stating that “Googlebot can’t access your site” it’s safe to ignore for now. Google is having some issues today.

Google’s Matt Cutts posted the following a little bit ago.

Hey everyone, please don’t worry about this message at this point. Enough people are getting this message that I suspect it’s an issue on our end. I’ve got an email out to our webmaster tools team, and we’ll figure out what’s going on. Thanks.

For more coverage, head on over to Search Engine Roundtable.

So it’s no secret that Centric owns and recognizes the StopTech and Power Slot brand.  However, these brands have always been sold independently under their respective banners.

However, that is slowly changing.  Moving forward PowerSlot Rotors will now be sold as a slotted variant under “StopTech Sport Rotors” umbrella.

It makes sense on a number of levels; the part numbers are already identical (except for prefix), ordering will now be streamlined and the StopTech name is well recognized in the industry.  This doesn’t necessarily mean the end of PowerSlot, just, the evolution… and we’ll see how natural selection works it out.

Tonight (Tuesday morning) at 2AM EST our host, Rackspace, will be performing routine maintenance on all the servers powering RPMWare. During this maintenance your RPMWare website may be intermittently unavailable as servers are restarted.

These updates have been well planned by our dedicated Rackspace sysadmin team to minimize downtime and ensure no data is lost. If you have any questions please get in touch with me.

– Kyle

The Holidays are right around the corner marking the end of another fantastic year for RPMWare. We hope you have time to sit down, relax and reflect on the past year and prepare for the upcoming one. On behalf of everyone at RPMWare, we are wishing you and your families all the best.

The RPMWare holiday schedule is posted below. Please note: someone is on call 24/7/365 to address any critical errors.

File this one under why didn’t we think about that 6-years ago. After a couple customers brought this to our attention, we added coupon to your order detail screen. Now you’ll know if your customer used a coupon or not.

Note: Coupons will only be shown on orders created after today at 2PM EST (12/12/2012).

Six years ago today we filed the paperwork that created RPMWare Inc. Since then we’ve helped hundreds of shops and distributors sell millions-of-dollars worth of parts. Thanks for trusting us with your business and helping to make RPMWare a success.

— Matt & Kyle

I can’t believe Thanksgiving is only a week away. This year, like most years lately, has passed far too quickly. Matt and I hope you’ll be able to slow down a bit this holiday season and enjoy what you’ve been working so hard for.

Turkey by Ginger Me on flickr

The RPMWare holiday schedule is posted below. Please note: someone is on call 24/7/365 to address any critical errors.

After making major improvements to how we calculate shipping, we set our sights on helping you market your shipping promotions. We’re now including shipping rates in your Google Shopping Data Feeds.

These rates will help you stand out from your competitors and generate more traffic to your site. For more information please check out our Google Shopping support article. If you’re not already using the Marketing Toolkit Data Feeds, now is a great time to get started.

We just released a major shipping overhaul that we’ve working on for over a month. We’ve improved every aspect of how RPMWare calculates shipping for your customers.

Shipping Adjustments

Shipping adjustments received a major makeover based on your feedback. You can now easily offer things like Free Shipping on a particular brand, or $150 Fixed Rate Shipping on large items like hoods and turbo kits. Please review our shipping adjustments guide for all the details.

Before today’s release shipping adjustments would apply to every shipping method you had available. That made it impossible to offer things like “Free Shipping on AEM” without also displaying $0.00 UPS Next Day Air to your customers.

USPS

By popular demand we’ve integrated support for these United States Postal Service shipping services:

• Express Mail
• Priority Mail
• Parcel Post

To enable these new rates: login to your RPMWare account and navigate to Configuration, then Shipping Methods. For more details, check out our full guide to shipping methods.

Live Rates

We optimized every step of interacting with the UPS, FedEx, and USPS APIs. The details are pretty geeky, but the end result is faster, more accurate rate quotes with fewer errors.

Feedback

What do you think? Let us know via a support ticket or on Facebook.