Small business advice: How to avoid online blunders like Walmart's "Fat Girl" costumes By David Rekuc October 31 at 4:50 PM This week, traditional and social media were abuzz after Walmart's most recent (and frankly confusing) gaffe. Alongside the more predictably themed scary and sexy Halloween outfits, the retailer listed "Fat Girl Costumes" as a shopping category on its Web site. Needless to say, the public reception to this discovery was rather negative. We still don't know exactly why Walmart pushed out such a problematic page - the company's apology only explained that it "shouldn't have happened." Still, several of the most plausible scenarios can be explained by mistakes any e-commerce company could easily make - and should take steps to avoid. Keep it clean, even behind the scenes One possibility behind the blow-up is that Walmart marketers, writers, coders or contractors used the term "fat girl costumes" as a mean-spirited placeholder for their products while the section was being developed. Then, as Halloween approached, someone hit "publish" without dropping in final page titles. The lesson here is obvious: Use professional placeholders during the testing stages of any project. It's just too easy for temporary text to make it through to final pieces, even with diligent checking), so make your work is insult-free. Walmart would've never faced backlash if its category had gone live as something like "womens_plus_cat3." Don't leave it to automation There are tons of scripts and Web tools that could have automatically generated Walmart's terrible category page. The company may have commissioned a tool to create content based on popular searches or other shopper behavior. And they're not the first to pay for automation. In 2010, Amazon's Jeff Bezos erupted when he learned a customer received an automatically generated email stuffed with sales links to unwelcome sex-related products. If you're going to automate a process, put human oversight in place. Plan for the worst-case scenarios or exclude certain content or audiences from the process. Test relentlessly and make sure there's no way your robots can get out of hand. Not on good terms Anyone selling online knows the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) for generating web traffic. Stores frequently research the keywords customers use when shopping, then plug those terms into their products and categories for increased exposure. It's possible Walmart pulled an overly broad batch of keywords then plugged them in blindly by search volume. (though in this case, it doesn't appear that's what happened as "fat girl costumes" isn't even a very common search term). No matter how popular a term is, it's important to curate keyword lists before dropping them into marketing campaigns or Web site descriptions. Usually, this kind of flub is innocuous. Staples, for instance, recently threw advertising dollars away trying to sell desks to people who were going out of their way to build their own from scratch. Harmless or not, there are just too many unfiltered, uninformed, or completely irrelevant queries out there to trust that every term is useful. Marketers should take time to ensure they're not using anything that could anger customers, waste advertising budget, or both. There's never a good time to slip up, but... Your biggest sales pushes are most certainly the time to hunker down and get it right. Last year, Target famously dropped the ball on data protection right in the middle of holiday shopping, the most important time of the year for retailers. Halloween means huge sales spikes for anyone selling costumes, which is exactly why Walmart should've paid extra attention to these products in the lead up to October 31. Some business owners may believe they cannot afford to hire extra proofreaders, developers, or beta testers, but if you're pushing out a major project or product line, you must also ask yourself, "Can I afford to face an online firestorm if I get it wrong?" David Rekuc is the marketing director at Ripen eCommerce, a full-service digital agency that provides development, design and marketing solutions for online retailers. Follow On Small Business on Twitter.