Yesterday SingleFeed announced changes to our service plans intended to help merchants maximize sales and take advantage of SingleFeed’s core value proposition; the ability to submit, manage, and optimize one feed instead of many feeds.

The changes:
-We’ve canceled the Basic and Silver plans.  All existing merchants on these plans must choose a different SingleFeed plan or their account will be canceled  on March 1, 2009.  We’ve provided special promotions to existing merchants to migrate them into our newly developed, more valuable plans. [These promotions were sent by email.  If by any chance you did not receive an email, please contact us through the online support system or account manager (Silver).]

-We’ve created a new plan called SingleFeed Starter.  Think of this plan as a way for merchants to get their feet wet before jumping into the deep end of the shopping engine ocean.  Through this plan, SingleFeed will submit your products to Google Product Search, Live Product Upload, TheFind, and buySAFE.  Other no-cost or cost per acquisition (CPA) (only pay if a sale is made) engines will be added over the next couple months. The price of SingleFeed Starter is $99.99/mo.

-We’ve increased the price of SingleFeed Gold to $239.99/mo and increased the price of SingleFeed Platinum to $599.99/mo.  We’re grandfathering in all existing merchants for 3 months at the old rates.

The reasons for the changes:
Plain and simple, we’re adding more value to our services.

When I started SingleFeed, I thought the idea of a Basic plan was sound.  Attract merchants at a free or extremely inexpensive price point, let them see the value of the service, and then they would upgrade to a higher level plan.  However, we’ve found out that the low barrier to entry (free for the first month, $4.99/mo thereafter) is also a low barrier to exit.  And as SingleFeed failed to help some Basic merchants significantly improve their businesses – we didn’t migrate them to our more valuable Gold or Premium services, we didn’t give them enough data feed optimization (DFO) knowledge, and at $4.99/mo, we couldn’t go above and beyond – we decided that a new servive, SingleFeed Starter, was necessary.

SingleFeed Starter not only leverages our strength of allowing a merchant to submit one feed as opposed to many, but it also allows the merchant to get comfortable with the shopping engines and SingleFeed at a very low price point.  It’s time to move beyond Google AdWords, and SingleFeed Starter allows you to do this quickly and easily. At $99.99/mo (special promotions were offered to existing clients), we’re targeting merchants that have yearly ecommerce revenue of at least $125,000 or are looking to quickly grow revenue to $125k or more by leveraging a new online marketing channel.  SingleFeed performs hours of setup work to make sure your products are listed on the shopping engines (we don’t just submit it and forget it), we’re categorizing your products for Google Product Search, and making sure your feeds are optimized to give you the highest probability of success on the shopping engines.

As for the SingleFeed Gold and SingleFeed Premium price increases, we took a hard look at the costs involved with working on these plans as well as the benefits we deliver to our clients.  For Gold, we chose only a slight increase of $50/mo because this is our featured plan and what merchants should really be taking advantage of.  When you take into account setup, ongoing maintenance, categorization, reporting, unlimited online support, data feed optimization (DFO), engine checks (Premium), DFO consulting (Premium), and phone support from a dedicated account manager (Premium), SingleFeed in many ways was going above and beyond the call of duty for what we were charging.  With the new prices, we clearly have to better communicate the benefit of these services and the work we’re doing (often behind the scenes) and this is a big focus for the entire company, not just the account management team.

What’s on the horizon?
We will be adding new features and working much harder on our platform to make sure we add more value to our merchants on all plans.

-We’ve recently made a lot of updates and improvements to our reporting system. Reporting is our top product focus in 2009.

-We’ll be adding a handful of new shopping engines.  We disagree with the strategy some data feed providers have taken in adding 100s of channels because we pride ourselves on knowing each channel intimately (you know, being able to call a real person at engine XYZ to make sure your product images went live), but we will add a few of the top shopping channels we’re currently missing.  And we’ll do it right.

-As proper categorization is one of the biggest drivers of success on the shopping engines, we’ve invested significant resources over the last 6 months to develop a MegaTaxonomy tool.  We’re currently testing. With this new tool, your products will be categorized quicker and more precisely. We also hope to open this categorization process up so that you have better insight into the categorization process.  Expect this type of transparency throughout our business in 2009.

-We’re testing a new Data Feed Optimization (DFO) tool to help you identify and attack major optimization opportunities.  Google AdWords made managing PPC campaigns fun.  Dealing with data feeds is not fun.  This DFO tool will hopefully open your eyes to DFO opportunities as well as make the optimization process more interesting and informative.

You will see a lot more changes at SingleFeed throughout 2009.  And you will not just hear words like ‘accountability’ or ‘transparency’ coming from me, but see it in the services we’re offing you.

This is going to be a tough year for all retailers, but we believe that the shopping engines (and some related shopping channels) will be a beacon of light in a fairly dreary economy. Consumers will be looking for great deals on great products and the shopping engines will deliver.

We look forward to working with you to help you succeed.

Brian Smith
CEO
SingleFeed
‘brian at singlefeed dot com’

We’d like to wish everyone the best for 2009. The last few months have been extremely difficult for many if not all of us and we hope that in the upcoming year we’ll be able to overcome the challenges. I wanted to avoid the cliche by asking everyone what their resolutions are. Instead, I want to know what challenges do you look forward to facing the most?

Here’s what a few members of our team are looking forward to in 2009.

“SingleFeed’s engineering department looks forward to tackling a long list of exciting technical challenges in 2009, such as increasing utilization of cloud computing, enhancing our system’s reporting capabilities, and providing our growing user base with even better response and performance for processing their data feeds.” – Mason, Development Manager

“My team looks forward to the challenge of helping our current merchants succeed and grow in what looks to be a continued, tough economic environment.   We also look forward to helping merchants who are new to the shopping engines learn about and begin participating in a channel that can be hugely successful when other, more traditional ad revenue is drying up.” – Colin,  Client Services Manager

“I am looking forward to finding new and innovative ways to help merchants get on board with SingleFeed through our platform integrations and acquiring new clients via general partnerships. I am truly excited to think about our service supporting a growing client base that is 20, 50, even 100 times what it is now.” – Ryan, Business Development Manager

Happy New Year!