SingleFeed Blog

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.