SingleFeed Blog

If you are an online retailer of halloween products, ie- costumes and decor, you better be ready for the increasing search traffic by the end of this month. Based on last year’s Google Trends data, queries for “halloween costumes” began to take off on August 24th and grew steadily until approximately the week before Halloween. A report last year by the National Retail Federation claimed that Halloween spending would be around $5.77 billion for 2008

If you are in this category as a merchant we recommend that you double, even triple check your shopping engine accounts and product listings on a frequent basis for the next 10 weeks to ensure everything is running as it should. Be extremely careful as you enter into the last homestretch as many of the shopping engines will feature devoted sections on their homepages for halloween costumes and decor as some merchants have been said to spend tens of thousands of dollars a day in CPC fees on the engines during peak traffic days. Proper categorization is always important as well. Most of the engines have categories devoted to costumes for adults and kids, as well as pets, and all the accessories to go with such as gloves, hats, capes and cloaks. Update your data feed frequently to reflect current stock and quantities of items, you don’t want to be paying for clicks on items that you are out of stock on.

Do your part to get ready now, and save yourself pain and headache during the chaos.

As you may know, Shopping.com is switching all credit card processing over to PayPal (makes sense as they are both an Ebay company). Shopping.com says that as a merchant, you will have more flexibility, security, and functionality with this new payment processing.

If you have a merchant account with Shopping.com, please make sure you sync up your Shopping.com account with your PayPal account before Sept 10, 2009. At that time Shopping.com will begin processing all credit card payments through your PayPal account. For more information, just log into your Shopping.com merchant account. From there you’ll be prompted with instructions. It should just take a couple minutes!

For years I’ve wanted to bring the shopping engines and merchants closer together. This new Yahoo! Group is an attempt to do just that: get the decision makers – big and small, merchant or shopping engine – in the same (virtual) room to discuss the most important topics, best practices, network, help each other out, and more.

This group will be moderated and access restricted to those who are serious about learning and helping others. This is not a group about selling your wares.

Sign up now by going to the Yahoo! Group today.

We accidentally introduced an issue yesterday when making an update to the condition field such that any products listed as “new” will return as errors when importing.  Many of our merchants, especially those using the auto-download functionality, will receive email alerts notifying them of this.  Your condition field may be blank or contain the word “Newew.”  We are working to fix this ASAP and should have it resolved by the end of the day.  Please rest assured that this will not negatively affect any of your data on the shopping engines.