Growing Pains April 24th, 2007
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
