SingleFeed Blog

Here at SingleFeed we’re big believers in trying to work in an agile way — taking on the work in bite-sized chunks, getting them done, and seeing what’s next, rather than attacking a huge monolithic project and not seeing results until it’s done. As part of managing that work, we use Jira to track items that need attention, as detailed in a previous post. For breaking down a project into the aforementioned bite-sized chunks and tracking progress, however, we’re looking at other tools.

Certainly, there’s the good old “task list in TextEdit” approach, or using Excel to list what needs to be done and tracking things old-school. There are better, more modern ways, however. Jira has a plugin called GreenHopper which seems interesting, but it’s fairly complex and expensive. Right now we’re interested in testing things out and keeping investment low, so we’ve been looking at tools such as Pivotal Tracker, AgileBuddy, and ScrumNinja. AgileBuddy isn’t free while the others are, but it’s not expensive either. At the moment, we’re trying out ScrumNinja on one of our current projects, and so far it’s simple but gets the job done. We’ll see what we think when we’re done with the project.

Tools are useful, but only if they aid a process that everyone buys into and that gets things done in a healthy way. Since Agile development can mean so many different things, it’s important to decide on your process first and then find the right tool, rather than allow a tool to change your process in ways that might not be right for your team. We’ll report back after our experiments, and in the meantime welcome other suggestions and descriptions of other experiences.

We would like to invite you to a webinar that we are co-hosting with our partners at FastPivot, TopRight and PowerReviews. Together, our four companies provide technology, services and expertise for Yahoo Stores. You can register now for this opportunity to hear the experts share tips and advice from their specific area.

On Wednesday, October 21st at 1pm Eastern Time, we will get together to share some best practices with you.

Simple Improvements for Big Holiday Results

We will focus on some quick changes you can make to your Yahoo Store to earn more revenue this holiday season:

* Managing your shopping engine feeds
* Adding intelligence to your email marketing
* Impacting conversions with customer reviews
* Installing features your customers expect

There is no cost for this webinar, but you must pre-register to ensure that there will be enough spots left for everyone who is interested in attending. Please register now.

Amazon is running a promotion during the month of October, offering a $25 click credit for new merchants receiving their first click-out from Product Ads over the course the month.  If you haven’t already checked out Product Ads, definitely do so.  We’ve found that it is a channel that converts extremely well for many of our customers: