SingleFeed Blog

Following close behind our SingleFeed Export Extension for Magento, I am happy to announce an add-on tool for osCommerce. That’s two down, several more to go on the ecommerce platform integration wish list!

osCommerce is one of the original open source platforms.  The osCommerce add-on installs into the tools section in the Admin for an osCommerce website. The add-on exports merchant’s products into a SingleFeed format every night and can even be generated manually with the click of a button. The manual feature is handy if a merchant has significant changes to their products and wants to get them sent to the engines faster.

Download our SingleFeed osCommerce Add-on today.

If you want more information on the osCommerce Add-on or have other questions about SingleFeed, visit our osCommerce partner page and someone will contact you.

About osCommerce
osCommerce is an online shop e-commerce solution that offers a wide range of out-of-the-box features that allows online stores to be setup fairly quickly with ease, and is available for free as an Open Source based solution released under the GNU General Public License. osCommerce was started in March 2000 and has since matured to a solution that is currently powering 14,071 registered live shops around the world. Today, osCommerce has been taken to the next level, moving towards an e-commerce framework solution that not only remains easy to setup and maintain, but also making it easier for store administrators to present their stores to their customers with their own unique requirements. The success of osCommerce is secured by a great and active community where members help one another out and participate in development issues reflecting upon the current state of the project.

SingleFeed is in the process of adding Amazon Product Ads as a supported engine.  Right now Amazon Product Ads is listed on the Engines page, but you can’t activate it.   We have not set a firm launch date, but we’re aiming for the end of this month (hopefully sooner).  Amazon Product Ads will be an option for merchants using SingleFeed Gold or SingleFeed Premium.

While it’s easy for SingleFeed to add new engines, we want to make sure we have a strong relationship with our partners prior to launch.  The few times we’ve rushed a launch, it’s come back to bite us in the you know what (and our Account Management team has rightfully offered me up for public flogging).

There are many data feed management companies which claim to work with 40, 80, or even 150+ shopping engines. While that’s a great marketing tactic and merchants can definitely get some sales from niche engines, the majority of merchants should be concentrating their efforts on optimizing their campaigns for the top shopping engines, because that’s where the bulk of traffic and sales occur.  It’s just like working with the PPC engines.  Beyond Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and MSN AdCenter, how much time are you spending managing and optimizing your listings on the second tier PPC engines?

SingleFeed takes pride in making sure that we don’t just submit data feeds, but that our merchants go live on the shopping engines we work with.  Anyone can submit a data feed, but if images are missing or categorization is insufficient, merchants will not succeed and the only thing analytics packages will show is that you should suppress (cut) half your SKUs.  Our account management team knows the ins and outs of our partners’ merchant account centers so we can effectively troubleshoot and fix any problems.  However, we always have real contacts at the shopping engines in case we need assistance, and we communicate with the shopping engines frequently to stay ahead of any changes that might effect how merchants are listed.

Here’s a quick update on Live Product Upload…

All merchants trying to sign up for Live Product Upload are running into the same problem that we explained last week: merchants are being put on a waiting list.   If you have an existing Live Product Search account, great, SingleFeed can deliver your feed. If you were interested in getting up on this engine, we’re sorry. We were unaware of the freeze on new accounts.  Our mistake.

To make it up to you, we will be adding another engine, Live CashBack, this month! This engine is also free to list on (you only pay if you get a conversion), but should provide even more value to you as a merchant since Microsoft will be pushing Cashback this year.  Microsoft announced Cashback last year, with Bill Gates saying: “We believe search can offer much more value to consumers and advertisers than it does today, and we see Live Search Cashback as an important opportunity to deliver additional value.  Our goal is to make Live Search the most rewarding commercial search destination on the Web.  Live Search Cashback will help advertisers drive more online sales while giving consumers a new way to stretch their dollars.”

We’re working with the Live Cashback team and will let you know as we get closer to activating the engine on SingleFeed.

Thanks!

-brian

Some users have notified us that they are having problems signing up for Live Product Upload.  Wanted to let you know that we have some inquiries into Microsoft and will let you know as soon as we hear anything.