SingleFeed Blog

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).