SingleFeed Blog

SingleFeed places no limits on the size of the product feeds that can be submitted. As a SingleFeed merchant, you can upload a file of unlimited size to us. (please be patient, the big files take a while to upload and process)

That being said, there are some temporary constraints that we have in place. The Excel file format is currently limited to only 5MB in size. For the moment, this is because of the technology constraints imposed on us by the libraries currently used in our development environment.

For all non-Excel file formats, there are no size restrictions.

To work around the Excel file size limitation, we recommend you save the file format in a CSV (comma delimited) or TSV (tab delimited) file formats — both formats can be generated by selecting ‘Save As’ within Excel (if you are seeking to convert an Excel file, of course). I will be blogging about how to easily create and edit your CSV file in an upcoming post.

Enjoy.

Jeremy Horn

SingleFeed

Thanks to our strong development team, SingleFeed has released a slew of feature that can help all merchants with data feed optimization (DFO).  However, I know not everyone has time to keep up with our FAQs or emails or data feed optimization tips, so I wanted to start highlighting some of the features which are either working silently in the background or right there in your face, but still overlooked.

Today’s product tour highlights the ability to send different products to different engines.

Why should this matter to you?  Products can perform differently on different shopping engines.  For example, a men’s silk tie on one shopping engine might be converting at 6% while only converting at 2% on another.  When you take into account the cost per click (CPC) rate – which again varies from one engine to another, your return on investment (ROI), return on ad spend (ROAS), or bottom line profit might be drastically different depending on the shopping engine.

Because of this, SingleFeed allows merchants to include different products in the data feeds for different shopping engines.  And unfortunately, many merchants don’t take advantage of this opportunity.

In the sample SingleFeed, there are ‘include fields‘ which allow a merchant to define the exact product set for each data feed.  The default is to send every product to every shopping comparison engine.  However, if a merchant doesn’t want to include a certain product in a feed to an engine, all the merchant has to do is put an ‘N’ in the corresponding engine’s include field.  For example, if a merchant doesn’t want to send a certain product to Shopping.com, PriceGrabber, and Smarter.com, the merchant just has to put a ‘N’ in the Shopping.com Include Field, PriceGrabber Include Field, and Smarter Include Field.

Merchants should be sending all their products to Google Base and any other free shopping comparison engines.  However, merchants should be smart about including products in feeds to CPC based engines.  SingleFeed will soon release tools tools to help merchants make better informed decisions as this will help you with quantitative data feed optimization.  In the meantime, the conversion trackers on the shopping engines can help you figure out which products are performing well and every merchant should already be using an analytics program like Coremetrics, Google Analytics, Engine Ready, and/or Omniture.

Read more about refining product data feeds at LoveYourFeed.

Shopzilla’s FTP servers are back up and running.

In today’s daily feed submission, every SingleFeed member who has products for submission to Shopzilla were successfully submitted.

Thank you.

Jeremy Horn
SingleFeed

Shopzilla’s servers are currently experiencing some technical problems that impact the submission of new data feeds.  We are in touch with our friends at Shopzilla to be able to provide you the latest updates on this matter as soon as we have them.

What does it mean for you?
SingleFeed is designed to continue to poll the Shopping Engines that are having trouble and submit your feeds as soon as any Shopping Engine that is having temporary difficulties is resolved.

Updates
Stay tuned here. As soon as we hear more or observe that the situation has cleared up we will let you know that everything has returned to normal.

BTW
Also, take note, that no other engines are impacted by this issue; and your SingleFeeds are being submitted to all other engines that you have enabled and on schedule.

Jeremy Horn
SingleFeed