Optimizing customer experience goes beyond delivering an efficient and robust checkout, payment, and shipping experiences for the consumer. It is also important to engineer a pleasant and intuitive shopping journey as they navigate through your site.

According to DazeInfo, eCommerce merchants need to optimize their site the way brick and mortar store owners streamline their shop front. One way to deliver more unique and useful features to your customers is to take advantage of various add-ons and customizations that are available for your web store. "If you’re not already using an eCommerce platform to design and maintain your online store, it is strongly suggested that you begin taking these interfaces to your advantage," DazeInfo asserts.

Enhance your customers' buying experience by applying skin tokens to your web content. Skin tokens refer to customizable elements found in the eCommerce website that can be changed according to your brand's preferences. This feature personalizes your web store and adds more functionality for shoppers.

The tokens can affect small details such as the titles or names used to address logged-in shoppers. It can also completely transform the look and feel of your site, by adding elements such as polls, social media feeds, search boxes, and more.

You can edit skin tokens by adding them to the template.ascx file that is automatically generated for your website skin. This documentation breaks down the steps for adding and editing skin token features to your site. For this example, we are using the (!COPYRIGHTYEARS!) token. This particular attribute can be placed anywhere in the template to display your company's copyright. This image shows how to insert the (!COPYRIGHTYEARS!) token to your template.ascx file.

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When applied to your live web store, the token will then display the most current year.

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Here is the list of Skin Tokens that you can add to any template file, with a short description of their attributes:

• (!COPYRIGHTYEARS!) - Automatically displays the current year as determined by your database.
• (!SEARCH_BOX!) - Renders a search box and button to the page & clicking the button links to search.aspx
• (!HELPBOX_CONTENTS!) - Renders only the contents of the help topic to the page – can be used as a custom HTML chunk for reusable contents.
• (!NEWS_SUMMARY!) - Displays a list of current news summaries to the page
• (!ADVANCED_CATEGORY_BROWSE_BOX!) - Renders a styled table with a list of the categories. This token will soon be deprecated in favor of XmlPackages.
•  (!ADVANCED_MANUFACTURER_BROWSE_BOX!) - Renders a styled table with a list of the manufacturers. This will soon be deprecated in favor of XmlPackages.
• (!POLL!) - Displays polls that have been created through the admin site.

If you don't have an in-house web design team that knows the process of editing skin tokens, you can take advantage of the eCommerce Skin Design Services offered by CB. The top-notch design team will guide you through the process of fine-tuning your store's design aesthetic and help you stand out from the crowd.