Yes, it is true. As of March 11, 2010, Yahoo! Shopping will no longer be accepting feeds via Yahoo! Product Submit. Instead, they will be receiving all their product data from Pricegrabber.
If you already have a Pricegrabber account, your products will automatically be sent over to Yahoo! Shoppping, as of 3/11/10.
If you do not already have a Pricegrabber account, you can set one up here. For a limited time, you can choose to submit to Pricegrabber and their network of sites, including Yahoo! Shopping, or you can choose to submit only to Yahoo! Shopping.
Due to this change, you’ll notice that Yahoo! Product Submit is no longer an available engine in your SingleFeed account.
In your SingleFeed reports, bear in mind that historical traffic data antedating 3/11/10 will still be attributed to Yahoo! Shopping. Any Yahoo! Shopping traffic postdating 3/11/10 will be attributed to Pricegrabber. This is because all Yahoo! Shopping traffic is being fueled by your Pricegrabber feed. However, Yahoo! Shopping will likely be extending a grace period with their feeds as merchants run-down any remaining funds in their Yahoo! Product Submit accounts, and as merchants continue to migrate over to Pricegrabber. For that reason we suspect that you’ll still see some traffic post 3/11/10 being attributed to Yahoo! Shoppping.
As far ramifications to your overall CSE campaign performance, there are a few considerations. As Brian mentions in his post, Pricegrabber will gain more click-share as it appropriates all Yahoo! Shopping traffic. But this could be a mixed bag. Yahoo! Shopping is a popular engine, and it does bring in quite a bit of traffic, but not as much as we all would assume, considering its big name cache. On top of that, conversion rate at Yahoo! Shopping is lower than that of Pricegrabber, according to aggregrate SingleFeed statistics. So you may likely see traffic for Pricegrabber go up, but conversion rate may actually go down. But if you’ve been live on Yahoo! Shopping for a while, and you are happy with the performance, then there’s nothing to worry about. Not much will change, except how your product data gets to Yahoo! Shopping.