SingleFeed Blog

Since so many of you are doing so well on the shopping engines, we were hoping you might help us spread the word to friends you think could benefit from using SingleFeed.

Refer a new Google Base data feed submission merchant to SingleFeed, and we’ll reward you by crediting your account with $5. Refer a new Deluxe data feed submission merchant to SingleFeed, and we’ll reward you by crediting your account with $50 and reward your friend by crediting his/her account with $50. The merchant you refer must stay with SingleFeed for at least a month.

When your friend signs up, just make sure to email us (’support at singlefeed dot com’).

This is a test. We’ll institute a traditional referral/affiliate program in the future.

This offer does not apply to agencies as we have a different offer for you.

Thanks!
-brian

Update: The problem has now been resolved

Maybe Google Base is experiencing the same growing pains that we are! Ok, probably not, but there are two notes in everyone’s Base account this morning:

‘File registration is temporarily unavailable’ and ‘File uploading is temporarily unavailable’.

We’ll let you know when everything is back up and running.

It has been about 8 months since we launched the Beta version of SingleFeed back in September of 2006 and we remain just as dedicated and excited to improving and simplifying your overall experience, interaction, and successes with the Shopping Engines as ever!  Some of the points I talk about below Brian just mentioned in his posting, but I felt it good to re-emphasize our commitment to meeting and exceeding all expectations and desires.

In the beginning…
We knew that simplifying the process of submitting merchants’ products would be very appealing to the smaller sized businesses out there, those who often don’t have the technical support, expertise, or just plain, time, to get their products onto one Shopping Engine (not to mention getting listed on 2,3,4, or more).  We hadn’t, at the time, fully appreciated just how much in need our service was, not just for the small guy, but for just about EVERYONE who submits products to the engines, who wants their products to be kept “fresh” in the listings, and who wants the contents of their feeds to be correct and optimized.

SingleFeed was built upon a core set of values…
It is very important to me, Brian, and the rest of us at SingleFeed that we do our best to be open and honest with our members and provide the easiest and best service and support out there.  To everyone who has been there for us throughout our Beta, whose support has been invaluable in our designing, re-working, and improving SingleFeed, to those of you who just signed-up with us — we believe very strongly, at our core, to not hide our weaknesses, but to effectively communicate them to you.

There were growing pains…
Simply put, growth of our user base has occurred faster, the merchant product listing size has averaged a 10x magnitude larger,  and the total quantity of products that we are checking, evaluating, and automating optimizations and corrections for was ALL much grander than we estimated.

So…
I, and the rest of us at SingleFeed, apologize for our underestimating of demand on all fronts.  As soon as we recognized the growth curves we jumped into action and have moved very quickly to maintain, improve, and enhance all aspects of SingleFeed, from the nightly submission of all of your feeds, to new automated methods of feed submission.

To reiterate, and to be perfectly clear, ALL EXISTING AND NEW feeds are being processed correctly, using the Correction Wizard, and are being submitted on schedule, EVERY NIGHT.

What does all this mean for “me”?
Slowness, sluggishness…  The impact of all of the demand on the system manifests itself in visible slowness, sometimes to the point where an interface or the system seems stuck on an operation for your account.  YUCK!  Our architecture, algorithms, and database are being heavily taxed, thereby resulting in the slowness that many of you have more than likely experienced at various times in your use of SingleFeed.  Note, that even when the interface appears stuck, it isn’t … it is just going REALLY slowly.  Again, yuck.  This is NOT the experience we want for our members, nor should it be an something expected — all of these issues can and are being addressed.

New releases on the horizon…
Today, and on an ongoing basis, you will be seeing us roll out the MAJOR upgrades to our system.   We are rolling out bug fixes, improving the consistency of performance (and making everything run faster too), upgrading our backend architecture to handle the scalability and consistency of performance that our members DESERVE, and upgrading our database to better address the diverse group of individuals and merchants that have become, and are becoming, part of the growing SingleFeed community.

In the short term, as these performance- and architecture-related releases roll out, you should continue to expect sluggishness as we perfect the backend algorithms (and during the release processes) that make everything work.  Each of our releases are rigorously tested, but we would appreciate your help by pointing out to us, undesired slowness, unexpected behavior, bugs, and the like that, most likely we are working on, but may still have slipped through our net.

We are DEFINITELY going to continue to improve the services and features offered through SingleFeed as we continue to address the issues described previously.  You can expect:

• Further updates to the Correction Wizard (more automatic fixing, notifying, optimizing),
• More automation of the feed submission process
• Greater simplification of the overall user experience
• …and much more of the exciting features and improvements that you have come to expect, demand, and deserve, to see from SingleFeed.

And, as I have said, there are many releases on the horizon, and stay tuned over the next few days about those updates and how they will help make life easier for you and contribute to the improvement of the SIngleFeed experience.

At SingleFeed…
In all parts of SingleFeed, we are experiencing these growing pains.  Through our most recent round of financing, the strong team we already have in place, the new additions to our team (welcome Fred), and our close relationships with our partners, together we are working to address every last one of these items.

Please…
If you have any questions, comments, problems, contact us ANYTIME.  We are far from happy with the current state of satisfaction of our members, we want everyone to be AMAZED, EXCITED, and much more than just satisfied.  Were we are today, is NOT GOOD ENOUGH.  We sincerely apologize for not consistently EXCEEDING expectations — we will!

Until then…
Your feeds are being submitted on schedule, our basic system is work fine (but, slow), and we will always be open and to-the-point about our positives, as well as our negatives, and keep you in the loop and part of the conversation (and solution) about what we are doing to eliminate the negatives and grow the positives.

Very Sincerely,
Jeremy, Brian, and the rest of the SingleFeed team.

One thing that is extremely important to us is being open and honest. Some companies might try to cover up their weaknesses, but we’re not willing to compromise our core values. While we can’t share with you our ‘trade secrets’, we’re committed to being as transparent as possible. This post is an opportunity to share what’s been going on behind the scenes at SingleFeed.

First, I’d like to thank all our merchants, partners, and friends for their tremendous support since we launched. Our main goal from the beginning was to help merchants succeed on the shopping engines by submitting high quality data feeds, and we’re busy processing, managing, and submitting lots of optimized data feeds on your behalf. What’s most exciting to us is that you’re seeing real success on the shopping engines!

Many merchants who hadn’t been on the shopping comparison engines prior to using SingleFeed are experience a 20% boost in sales (and yes, this is being done profitably) and many merchants who were on Google Base or a couple other engines are saving time as well as seeing strong gains due to SingleFeed’s optimized product data feeds.

When we started SingleFeed, we made a number of assumptions about what kinds of merchants would use our service, the level of support that would be needed to handle 1000s of merchants, the underlying architecture needed to handle millions of product SKUs, and the growth rate of our company.

To be blunt, we underestimated on all fronts. From one perspective, that’s great news. From a more important perspective, though, we’re having trouble keeping up with demand.

Let me be clear, your feeds and any new merchant feeds are being submitted properly.

The problems are in getting back to merchants in a timely manner, fixing bugs quickly, and rolling out new features. Furthermore, our back end architecture as well as original database structure has been pushed pretty hard.

Luckily, all these issues can and will be addressed.

We want to delight our merchants, and while most of you are somewhat satisfied, that’s not good enough. For this, I personally truly apologize. We’re experiencing growing pains through all parts of our business, and it will take us a little while to get through this awkward stage. But we’re committed to making SingleFeed the best self-service data feed management, data feed optimization, and data feed submission system.

Our recent round of financing, the strong team we already have in place, new additions to the team, and our partners will help us address our growing pains. We have some very exciting releases scheduled over the next couple months which will make SingleFeed even more useful for our merchants. Also, stay tuned for a couple reports this week which will explain how we’re tackling our architecture and database issues.

In the meantime, if you have any questions or comments, contact us anytime @ ’support at singlefeed dot com’.

Again, I sincerely apologize that we’re not consistently exceeding expectations, but I promise we’ll get there. In the meantime, your feeds are being submitted properly and our basic system is working fine. We just need a little time to work on our rough edges.

Thanks for your patience!
-brian

The issue with billing of new accounts has been resolved.  Sorry for the inconvenience.  If you do run into any further issues, feel free to contact us @ ’support at singlefeed.com’.

Thanks!

If you’re trying to sign up for SingleFeed, you might run into a small billing problem.  We apologize for the inconvenience.  Our (very well known, national) credit card processor is looking into the issue.

When you click ‘Continue’ on the ‘Confirm’ page, you might see the following error message:

Credit Card rejected: SGS-020015

If this happens, you will be sent back to the ‘Billing’ page.  Please wait a minute and then click the ‘Continue’ button and then the ‘Done’ button on the following screen.  The problem is only intermittent, so please be patient.

We expect the issue to be resolved soon.  We apologize for the inconvenience.  Also, if you do run into the error, please email ’support at singlefeed.com’ so we can make sure to properly document all problems and then inform you when the problems have been resolved.

If you’ve been using SingleFeed to submit to Google Base and Froogle, your listings will automatically be sent to Google Product Search.

SingleFeed still submits your products directly to Google Base which then syndicates listings to Google Product Search. I know, it sounds confusing, but we’re on top of it.

As I’ve been telling everyone for a while, stop saying Froogle! Well, Google backed me up today by re-branding Froogle as Google Product Search.

While we’re still waiting for the site to launch (right now Froogle is still live), what I’m really hoping is that the rankings for Google Product Search are consistent with those for Google Base. We’ll update you as soon as we know.

The good news is that those Google Base Custom Attributes that I’ve been pushing you to submit should continue to give you an edge on your competition. As Tom Oliveri of Google explained “those attributes are critical to relevance going forward.” From the screenshots Google shared with me, it looks like refinement options beyond the basics (category, price, seller rating) won’t be readily accessible, but Tom said “there is a lot of work ongoing to make sure that those attribute and refinement options are there.”

Become has ‘granularized’ its taxonomy.  You should be getting an email from Become in the next couple days explaining the changes, but specifics can be found in Become’s Merchant Account center here.

SingleFeed will do it’s part to re-categorize your listings following this more granular level taxonomy.  It might take a little time for us to update all your listings, but in the meantime, you’re current categorization is fully compatible with Become’s updated requirements.
SingleFeed has consistently found that Become provides a high conversion rate and this taxonomy change should only help to improve your results.

We have some exciting news to share with you!

We’ve raised a round of venture capital to grow the business with an eye on developing the best application possible to help merchants succeed on the shopping engines and make sure that our merchants are very well taken care of.

To our many merchants, thank you so much for your support thus far.  Expect many significant enhancements to SingleFeed that will help you perform even better on the shopping comparison engines.  We’re building this business for you.  If there’s anything you need from us, please contact us anytime.

We’ve been going through some growing pains recently on all fronts.  We’ll always be open and honest with you, so you’ll be hearing more about our situation and what we’re doing to address any problems.
I’d also like to welcome our new parters, True Ventures and NetService Ventures.  We talked to a lot of potential backers, but in True and NetService, we found entrepreneurs and leaders who truly believe in our vision.

Now it’s time to get back to work!

Jeremy & Brian