We’ve had a Twitter account for a while but haven’t really put it to good use. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to make sure we’re using it more frequently. It will be used by both Brian and myself to notify everyone on happenings here at SingleFeed.

Go ahead and start following http://twitter.com/singlefeed today!

-Ryan

In an effort to simplify the setup process for Magento merchants, we have developed an easy to install extension for Magento based stores. We felt it was important to support one of the quickest growing ecommerce platforms available. Magento Commerce is an open source platform that has a strong community and supports sites of all kinds. We know that data feeds can be a pain and wanted to cut down on the integration time for Magento clients to build and submit a data feed to us. Prior to our extension, Magento merchants had to install and configure user generated scripts, some of which did not always play nice with other scripts or extensions. Even with the existing scripts as methods to export products, merchants still had to manage and maintain one feed per shopping engine. In under 5 minutes a merchant can install the extension, create a data feed, and begin submitting their products to SingleFeed. No more tying up your IT department’s resources. The merchant’s one feed file can then be sent out to the 14 different comparison shopping engines that we support including Google Product Search, Nextag, Pricegrabber, Shopzilla, Yahoo Shopping and more.

Check out our SingleFeed Export Extension available for download at MagentoCommerce.

To find out more about our extension and how it can help your business, visit our Magento partner detail page and we’ll get in touch with you shortly.

About Magento
Magento is a feature-rich, professional open-source eCommerce solution that offers merchants complete flexibility and control over the look, content, and functionality of their online store. Magento’s intuitive administration interface contains powerful marketing, search engine optimization and catalog-management tools to give merchants the power to create sites that are tailored to their unique business needs. Designed to be completely scalable and backed by an extensive support network, Magento offers companies the ultimate eCommerce solution.

As you may know, SingleFeed offers centralized reporting for all your shopping engine campaigns. These reports can be a powerful tool to measure your success on the shopping engines. However, we’ve recently discovered some discrepancies in the click and conversion data reported within SingleFeed between November 2nd and December 22nd (yesterday). Your click and conversion metrics are both likely to be under-reported. We are attempting to update this historical information so that it is correct, but please know that any reports run during that time frame will most likely be incorrect and your metrics will appear worse than they actually are.

SingleFeed is proud to officially announce three new supported shopping engines. Today we are activating Like.com and Shop.com comparison shopping channels and in the past month you may have noticed buySAFE show up on our engines list as well.  Our Gold and Platinum clients can begin submitting feeds to these channels immediately!  Login to your SingleFeed account and activate them on the Engines page.  Activating more engines through SingleFeed is a quick and easy way to boost your exposure and drive more sales throughout the holiday season.  If you are on the Basic or Silver plan and want exposure on these and other shopping sites, consider upgrading to a Gold or Platinum account today.

About Like.com

Like.com is the first true visual search engine, where the contents of photos are used to search and retrieve similar items. Like.com utilizes Likeness Technology to create a digital signature that describes the photo’s contents and enables a more accurate search for similar looking items and products. The site’s primary focus is on handbags, jewelry, shoes, and watches – allowing users to search and purchase items from thousands of leading and boutique brands. If you sell apparel, jewelry or other fashion related soft goods, then we definitely suggest listing your products on Like.com.  Visit www.like.com for more information.

About Shop.com

Shop.com is one of the largest shopping sites on the web with a target demographic that is 70% female.  Many years ago they introduced their OneCart technology, through which consumers could purchase items from multiple retailers all through Shop.com’s own cart system.  Shop.com traditionally charged advertisers on a CPO (cost per order) basis until more recently when they launched a CPC program, a model that is familiar to advertisers and one that allows them to maintain ownership of their customer.  SingleFeed is now integrated with Shop.com’s CPC program.  Visit www.shop.com for more information.

About buySAFE, Inc.

Backed by the strength of underwriters Liberty Mutual, Travelers, and ACE, buySAFE partners with online merchants to provide their buyers trusted, risk-free shopping. buySAFE inspects online merchants, monitors their performance and bonds their shoppers’ purchases up to $25,000.  Having a buySAFE Bonded Merchant Seal and Bond on your website is proven to convert 6.8% more shoppers on average!  After becoming bonded, SingleFeed can submit your products to buySAFE for display on their own buySAFE Bonded Shopping Network, which consists exclusively of buySAFE bonded retailers.  Visit www.buysafe.com and www.buysafeshopping.com for more information.

-Ryan

[This post assumes that you have product-specific tax or shipping rules. If you don’t, you can set global tax and shipping rules right in your Google Base account. Read this blog post for more info.]

Google Base now supports two new field for tax and shipping. Within your SingleFeed these are called “Google Tax” and “Google Shipping”, respectively. These fields are a little more complex than other fields, so bear with us on this. Since your tax and shipping rules are determined by various product-specific factors such as the tax rate of a particular item in a specific zip code, these fields support various sub-attributes that outline the particulars of your tax and shipping rules for that individual product.

The sub-attributes are:

For the “Google Tax” field:

1. “country” – The country an item is taxed in. (Optional)

2. “region” – The geographic region a tax rate is applied to. (Optional)

3. “rate” – The tax rate. (Required)

4. “tax_ship” – Whether or not you charge tax on any shipping fees. (Optional)

Within your SingleFeed “Google Tax” field, you specify all four of these attributes, separated by a colon (”:”), which acts as the delimiter. If you want to omit one of the optional attributes, no problem, you just need to include the “:” so Google can still read the string of information. So a tax rate of 9% for California, where tax is not applied to the shipping fee, would be specificed as: “US:CA:9:n”. What if you charge a different tax rate for a different tax region? No problem. You can include multiple tax attribute groups within this field also. Just separate each tax group by a “,” like this: ”US:CA:9:n, US:OR:7:n”.

For the “Google Shipping” field, there are also four sub-attributes:

1. “country” – The country an item will ship to. (Optional)

2. “region” – The geographic region a shipping rate applies to. (Optional)

3. “service” – The service class or speed. (Optional)

4. “price” – The shipping price. (Required)

The “Google Shipping” field abides by the same rules as the tax field: sub attributes must be separated by a colon (”:”); the colon must be included for all sub attributes; and attribute groups are separated by a comma. (”,”).

If this sounds all too complicated, don’t worry. You can also submit your tax and shipping rules from within your Google Base account. Just log in to your Google Base account, click on “Settings”, then “Tax and Shipping Settings”. Read this blog post for more info.

Google recently announced that you can now submit tax and shipping information about your products to Google Base via your Google Base account. This valuable information is being displayed to shoppers on Google Product Search! This is great for shoppers as it gives them a better idea of their final purchase price, and will likely lead to more qualified traffic to your store. Submitting this information does require a little bit of work, but Google has made it pretty easy and flexible. You can either set default shipping and tax rules right in your Google base account, or you can override those settings by submitting shipping and tax information on a product-level within your data feed (or via the Google Base API). What’s the best approach?

We recommend setting your shipping and tax rules in your Google Base account. This is the easiest way to do it, and will suffice for most merchants. For tax, you can enter tax rate values per state, or you can let Google know what states you charge tax in and they’ll estimate the tax for shoppers.

For shipping, you can set a flat rate for all products (or specify free shipping); set shipping costs based on a table (such as the number of items, total weight, or cart price); or have Google automatically calculate shipping based on a carrier rate (UPS, FedEx USPS).

As mentioned this will work for most merchants. If you need to submit item-specific tax and shipping rates, you’ll need to do that via the data feed you submit to Google, or via the Google Base API. You can get our take on this here, or just check out Google’s article. Whichever you decide, we recommend that you begin submitting this information to Google Base as soon as possible so they can start to provide better data about your products to potential buyers. This should get you more qualified traffic from Google Product Search.