SingleFeed Blog

We’re thrilled to announced that AlwaysOn has selected SingleFeed as a AO100 Top Private Company Award Winner. You can find out more about the award and see a complete list of winners at AlwaysOn. Here’s a bit from SingleFeed’s press release.

It’s great to be recognized as an innovative and disruptive force. It shows that our product vision has legs (lots of them) and our development team has produced incredible results.

And this is only the beginning. We’ve been hard at work improving the back-end architecture, adding new engines (coming very soon), working on partnerships, and much more. We’re giving our merchants the knowledge and power to succeed this holiday shopping season and well into 2008 and beyond. The tools and features we’re developing will enable SingleFeed merchants to rise above the crowd as they tackle the rough seas of data feeds and the comparison shopping engines.

Thanks to AlwaysOn for the recognition and thanks to our merchants, friends, investors, advisers, and partners for your continued support, critique, and advice, as we continue to build an incredible product.

P.S. Just wanted to add that this is not a ‘pay for play’ award. We did not grease any wheels to get this done.

Google Base is in the process of performing maintenance on their systems.  During this period, at least through Wednesday, July 18th, according to the Google Base folks, individuals will be unable to (1) register for new bulk uploads or (2) submit new products.  In addition, Google states that currently live products should not be impacted by this maintenance.

SingleFeed will continue to submit your feed to Google Base and your other Engines on our daily schedule.  As soon as Google Base’s maintence has concluded your feeds will be automatically sent, as usual, during the upcoming feed submission cycle.

To read more you can read the alert notice straight from the source @ Google Base:

• Google Base Blog Post: ‘File registration and uploading temporarily unavailable’
  http://googlebase.blogspot.com/2007/07/file-registration-and-uploading.html

We will pass along any updates on this issue on to you via our blog.

Jeremy Horn
SingleFeed

Little heads up. While some feeds being sent to Google Base seem to be processing without a problem, other feeds seem to be days behind in getting approved and listed on Base. These issues usually get fixed within a couple days. There are no special notes about this backup on the Google Base blog, but enough merchants have mentioned problems that it’s something to take note of. Remember, Google Base is processing a ton of feeds. Be patient. New products could show up within 24hr of a feed being submitted, but we’ve seen it take 5-7 business days.

On a similar note, I wanted to point out to SingleFeed users that we have always said (it’s on the homepage) that we’ll send out new Google Base feeds within 4 days of receiving a new feed and we’ll send out feeds to the other shopping engines within 5 days of receiving a new feed (our Deluxe service take a bit longer as we take the time to properly categorize your products).

We know that all new merchants want their feeds up yesterday, and we strive to get your feed submitted as quickly as possible, but remember that SingleFeed takes the time to review each data feed that comes in to ensure that you’re sending the best feed possible to the shopping engines.

Today’s SingleFeed’s product tour will give you a tiny peek into what we’re doing to make your life as a merchant easier.

Besides the fact that each shopping engine has a different specification and a different taxonomy, each engine also has unique quirks that will result in a rejected feed.  When I first started working with feeds, it was common for account managers at the engines to tell me that a 70-80% product acceptance/approval rate was a resounding success.

Gotta love the curve we’re being graded on!

Obviously SingleFeed thinks a 70-80% acceptance rate is unacceptable.  While we’re not perfect, we work extremely hard to get 100% acceptance/approval.  Ask any of the engines, and they’ll back us up on this one.

How do we do it?  When a merchant uploads a feed to SingleFeed, the feed is sent through our correction and optimization wizard.  This automated process looks for commonly made mistakes and automatically fixes them according to rules we have set.  Here are some examples:

-Many shopping engines ask for prices yet don’t allow merchants to submit dollar signs ($).  SingleFeed therefore strips dollar signs automatically from your feed.
-Many shopping engines don’t allow blatant promotional text (think: FREE SHIPPING! or FREE FREE FREE) in titles. SingleFeed therefore strips this type of text from your feed where appropriate.
-Submitting HTML to the shopping engines pretty much guarantees your feed will be rejected.  However, HTML often comes along for the ride when a merchant downloads a feed.  Imagine going through 700 product titles and descriptions to erase HTML!  SingleFeed parses out (properly formatted) HTML for merchants automatically.

These rules are just the tip of the iceberg.

We want to make your life easier and ensure that you’re submitting the best feed possible to the shopping engines.  Your responsibility as an internet marketer shouldn’t be to figure out all the ’special cases’ that aren’t in a feed specification file.  Leave that to SingleFeed.

We’re not perfect, but every new feed we submit helps us learn more about what makes the shopping engines tick, enabling us to help you succeed on Google Base, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, NexTag, Become, Smarter, Yahoo! Shopping, PriceGrabber (and more coming really really soon!).

Quick update.  According to Become.com, the categorization issue we reported earlier this week has been fixed.

Become has a little bug with its (fairly) new taxonomy.  Seems that any products mapped to a 4th level: ‘Home & Garden > Lawn, Garden & Outdoor > Lawn & Garden Maintenance > Lawn Mowers’, for example, are being placed in ‘Miscellaneous’.

Become assured SingleFeed that they are working on a solution and should have one in place before the end of the week.  We’ll let you know when we see the change.