SingleFeed Blog

I can’t believe this is real, but according to the Shopping.com site, they are not accepting new merchants until January 1, 2008.  “Due to an overwhelming number of requests during the holiday season, we are unable to accept any new merchants between October 24, 2007 and January 1, 2008. Please check back with us after this date.”

Luckily SingleFeed works with 9 other leading shopping engines.  So while Shopping.com might give you the cold shoulder this holiday shopping season, you can still sit by the fire with Shopzilla, Yahoo! Shopping, Smarter.com, NexTag, PriceGrabber, Google Product Search, Pronto, Become, and TheFind and their many syndication partners: BizRate, AOL Shopping, Calibex, MSN Shopping, Ask Shopping, Buy.com, Excite Shopping, Lycos Shopping, Google.com (depending on the relevance of your products and the quality of your data feed), CNET Shopper, CamcorderInfo, and hundreds of others.

Have a Yahoo! Merchant Solutions (or as many people call it, a Yahoo! Store) account?  If so, thanks to Alex (along with Rick and Grant), SingleFeed can now suck in your product data with just a couple clicks.

I’m a big proponent of launching features often and early.  We haven’t done that as much as we should have in the past, but will going forward.  Right now, we have a basic solution for Yahoo! Merchant Solutions accounts.  In other words, it isn’t perfect, but with a little hand-holding, we’ll make sure your product data feed gets up and running properly on the shopping engines.  Over the next couple months, we’ll learn, listen, test, and improve our solution, but we wanted to get something up and running as soon as possible.

So why do you need to use SingleFeed when Yahoo Merchant Solutions can feed your data to multiple shopping engines and you can use Google Base Store Connector to get on Google Product Search? 

We know that submitting a data feed to Shopping.com, NexTag, Google Base, etc. through a basic automated system does not take into account the quirks of the different engines, let alone the basic data feed requirements.  In other words, if you’re using an automated data feed management solution to submit your Yahoo! Store products to the shopping engines, your feed will not perform well, and you’ll be forced to significantly cut your feed (in order to maintain a positive ROI) or more likely, just stop advertising on the shopping engines.

So when SingleFeed imports product data from your Yahoo! Merchant Solutions account, we tell you that all of your products have errors, and we will not send out your data feed to the shopping engines until you improve the data quality (usually this means adding product attributes such as Manufacturer, Category, Product Type, etc.).  That may sound harsh, but SingleFeed is focused on Data Feed Optimization (DFO) because we know it makes a difference.

Just as you wouldn’t create a Google Adwords campaign, fund the account, and then check back 2 months later, data feed marketing takes a commitment if you want to succeed.

We’ll have details/instructions up early next week, but wanted to share the news.  IF you’re dying to get going this weekend, just email me (brian at singlefeed dot com).

Google announced that their bulk upload processing system will be undergoing “maintenance” until 6pm today (Thursday).  The Base account center also currently displays “File registration is temporarily unavailable. Notice: File uploading is temporarily unavailable” on the bulk upload tab.  Maybe this “maintenance” means they are fixing the processing delay issue…. we’ll see.

As a friendly reminder to everyone who is involved with data feeds, SingleFeed also runs a data feed optimization blog called LoveYourFeed. And thanks to Colin Murphy, our head of Account Management, the site is once again buzzing.

I’m constantly amazed that merchants still tell me that they ’submit it [a data feed] and forget it’. No wonder some merchants think that the shopping engines perform poorly. Shopping search is just another online marketing channel that has to be properly tended to. No merchants launch an Adwords or YSM campaign and check back a month later to see how their campaign did. Similarly, no merchant should submit it and forget it.

Data feed optimization (DFO) is real. SingleFeed helps all clients with the basics as we run every data feed through our correction/optimization wizard, but we’re not going to randomly modify your product attributes to include holiday keywords.
A lot of that type of work is up to the merchant. So with the holiday shopping season upon us, make sure to check out LoveYourFeed.com for data feed optimization tips and advice.

Google Base is having issues processing feeds.  This seems to have been occurring for upwards of a week now.  If you have noticed that your products have been stuck in the “published… searchable soon” state for several days, that the product status keeps changing, that new feeds don’t appear to be updating, or even that your products are going live and then disappearing, going live, disappearing, then these all maybe symptoms of the feed processing issue they are experiencing.  Google is aware of the issue and is actively looking into it.  We will post any updates here as we get them…