With these harsh economic times, I wanted to assure everyone that SingleFeed is here to stay.  While I wasn’t planning on spreading the news, I wanted all our customers to know that SingleFeed recently closed its Series B venture capital round (more details soon).  We have enough money to follow through on our vision of making data feeds fun.  Google AdWords is fun, easy, elegant.  Data feeds still stink.  SingleFeed will enable merchants to love their feeds and succeed on the shopping engines.
It’s been way too long since my last post, and I apologize.  We’ve been hard at work shoring up our systems before launching our next generation data feed creation, management, submission, and optimization platform.  We continue to grow, attracting merchants of all shapes and sizes that just want to succeed on the shopping engines.  After 2 years of product development, we’re now ready to aggressively expand.  Expect to see us out there a lot more as we ramp up business development, marketing, and sales efforts.

I promise to have more updates for you very soon.

Thanks!

-brian

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We’ve fixed the correction wizard problem that I mentioned earlier today.  Seems that it was just a front-end issue, meaning that the correction wizard was actually running.  Sorry for any inconvenience this might have caused.

We’re also playing a little catch up on categorization.  Hope to be caught up in the next 24hrs.

Just a reminder that we’re at Internet Retailer.  If you’re around please stop by Booth 1222!

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You may notice when you login to your account this morning that it looks like your feed is stuck at the correction wizard.  We are aware of this problem and are working to fix the issue.  We’ll report back to you as soon as we know more.

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First off, I would like to take a minute to introduce myself.  My name is Angela Karst and I am the newest member of the SingleFeed account management team.  I am very excited to be a part of a great company that is offering such a valuable service to merchants.  I look forward to working with many of you very soon!

We here at SingleFeed are very excited to share with you a new feature that recently went live on our site.  We call this feature “data synchronization” or “data sync” and it allows you to maintain any fields that you have uploaded previously and ensure that those fields will not get overwritten the next time you upload a new file. This feature is useful if you need to manually add or customize certain fields that won’t be present in the file you will be uploading to SingleFeed on a regular basis.  For instance, if you are importing a Yahoo Merchant feed, you might find that a SingleFeed required column like “manufacturer” isn’t in your Yahoo feed.  In the past, every time you uploaded a new feed you had to manually go in and add the manufacturer field.  Now after your first upload you can enter your data sync settings and check the box next to the manufacturer field.  This tells our system to leave that field as is every time you upload a new feed, thus saving you a lot of time and energy! 

For more details on data sync, visit this link: 

https://www.singlefeed.com/?s=datasync_feature

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We sent a note to all our merchants a couple weeks ago, but I wanted to remind everyone that we’ll be exhibiting at Internet Retailer in Chicago in 2 weeks.  We’re at Booth 1222.

This is a big leap forward for the company as it’s our first time exhibiting at any conference.

SingleFeed has been lucky enough to grow through word of mouth.  Compared to most companies in our space, we’ve spent pennies on marketing.  Since inception, I wanted to build a great product and have our merchants evangelize SingleFeed for us.  This has definitely been the case, and we’re organically growing at a nice clip.  So why the change?  Well, as I say with any marketing campaign, you have to test and track.  And if we’re going to test exhibiting somewhere, Internet Retailer is the place to do it.  eTail and Shop.org are also very important, but IR is the show for ecommerce in my mind.  And besides attracting new merchants, IR is a great place to catch up with current merchants, current and potential partners, and just generally spread the good word about our progress (and there’s been a lot - we’ll demo some important advancements at the show!).
So, if you plan to be in Chicago, please contact us, and we’ll set up a time to meet.  Hope to see you there!

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Sorry for the lack of blogging - here, on ComparisonEngines, and on LoveYourFeed.  But just because you don’t see any blog posts, doesn’t mean we’ve been asleep at the wheel.  In fact, it’s been just the opposite.  We’ve been working extremely hard on building SingleFeed into a stronger business.  Some of that comes in terms of additional resources - and I’ll talk about those resources soon - but a lot of that comes in terms of releasing features, enhancements early and often while taking care of bug fixes immediately.
Since my last blog post (April 15), we’ve released the following major enhancements:

-Self Service Portal (immediate case submission to account manager, ability to view related cases and get right to the answer)
-Online knowledge Base (detailed SingleFeed instructions, helpful hints, commonly asked questions)
-SKU level reporting view (view product level clicks by engines to quickly determine which SKUs should be suppressed from your feed)
-Data Synchronization (SingleFeed now remembers your data (stay tuned for details!)

-Extension of cookie life (we’ve been under-reporting your sales - not good.  our reporting is now much more accurate)
In addition, there have been a TON of back end improvements, account management enhancements, and quick bug fixes.

In total, we’ve had 5 releases in the past 6 weeks, comprising 25 enhancements/new features and 21 bug fixes.  And that’s just the start!  We’re ramping up for the holiday shopping season and there are many exciting new features and enhancements on the way.  I promise that we’ll be much better at communicating these releases in a much more timely manner going forward.

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One of the sessions I’m participating in next week at the Spring ECMTA Summit is on ‘new media’. Jonathan Garriss is giving me some room to play with this one, so I’ve set up a Facebook group. Please join here (or login to Facebook and search for eCommerce Merchants Trade Association).

You can also join SingleFeed’s Facebook group here (or login to Facebook and search for SingleFeed).

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With lots of required fields containing dozens of rules, it’s sometimes hard to submit a proper data feed. SingleFeed does a ton of work behind the scenes to clean up your feed upon submission, but in many cases an upload will contain errors. We realize we need to make it easier for merchants to understand the feed errors and quickly resolve any problems.

Our Feed Format Advice page is just a small step to make your life easier.

After the upload, if your feed has significant errors, we’ll display a button to bring you to the advice page.

Once on the Feed Format Advice page, you might see a couple sections, depending on the types of errors in your feed:Required Fields, Formatting Issues, and Unrecognized fields.

Here are some examples:

SingleFeed requires merchants to enter ‘y’ or ‘n’ for Stock Status.  SingleFeed will make appropriate translations if a merchant enters ‘yes’ or ‘no’, but if we don’t recognize the value in the Stock Status field, we’ll return an error.  In this case, the merchant entered ‘maybe’:

SingleFeed requires 12 fields.  If any of those fields are left blank, we’ll return an error.  In this case, the merchant didn’t enter values for Category, Manufacturer, or Condition:

As with most of the work we do, we’ll continue to refine the Feed Format Advice page.  If you have any recommendations, please let us know.

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Welcome to the new look of SingleFeed. We’re going to be iterating the design/UI a lot over the next couple months, but the basics are up and running. As Grant explains, this is only Phase 1. Phase 2, the new ‘logged in’ state, will launch next week. Also, we’re busy preparing lots of content for the new site, so the ‘coming soon’ pages will quickly be replaced.

Discuss the new design in the forum.

Thanks!

-b

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