SingleFeed Product Tour – Cleaning up Feeds one Rule at a Time July 6th, 2007
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!).