SingleFeed Blog

You may have noticed in the past few days that there are 4 new data feeds or “engines” which SingleFeed now supports.

SingleFeed has teamed up with a network of trusted site search providers who focus on site search, faceted navigation, and merchandising solutions for online retailers. Merchant’s who use Site Search and Personalization solutions can improve the relevancy of on site search results, satisfy shoppers, and increase sales and conversion rates.

Add faceted navigation and search filters, provide intelligent keyword and synonym search suggestions; all through your SingleFeed! SingleFeed can deliver a feed to any of the partners listed below for an additional $75 per month (introductory offer). We’ve chosen these partners, as they complete an offer that can help a wide range of merchants depending on their budgets and needs.

SearchSpring is an E-Commerce site search and faceted navigation solution which empowers online retailers to unleash findability. Delivering the latest in search and AJAX technology, SearchSpring enables merchants to provide a rich and engaging online shopping experience. SearchSpring puts merchants in the driver’s seat of their site’s search feature by giving them control over every aspect of the software, including the ability to customize the look and feel. Fine grained control over field-level configuration options and the ability to manage synonyms and merchandising settings available inside the newly redesigned SearchSpring Management Console.

With monthly pricing from $99/mo, SearchSpring provides a scalable, affordable site search solution for merchants of all sizes.

Nextopia Software provides next generation search, SEO, and site navigation technology to online retailers so they can increase sales through enhanced user experience and shopper satisfaction. More than 1,000 retailing leaders – including Abt Electronics, Crabtree & Evelyn, Scentiments, Karmaloop and Vintage Tub & Bath – trust Nextopia’s flagship product, eComm|Search. eComm|Search is an intelligent, eCommerce site search solution that enables retailers to leverage customer search and purchase behavior analysis and deploy sophisticated merchandising strategies. Retailers combine eComm|Search with Nextopia’s SEO tools, eComm|TrafficMaker and eComm|SearchCloud, to boost their natural search rankings.

With annual pricing starting at $995, Nextopia provides a best in class site search solution for merchants doing over $1M in annual revenue.

SLI Systems develops learning-based search and navigation technology for publishers, ecommerce and corporate sites that Searches, Learns and Improves the user experience. SLI Systems’ hosted site search and user-generated SEO solutions empower businesses to enhance customer satisfaction and help site visitors find the products and information they seek as quickly and efficiently as possible.

SLI Systems offers site search solutions for serious merchants with over 500 products doing at least $3M in annual revenue.

Certona is the leading personalization and revenue optimization provider for multi-channel retailers. Certona’s vision is to intelligently and automatically optimize and personalize the entire visitor experience for each individual, across all touch points, including their web site experience, email, mobile, in-store, call center and social networks. Certona’s Resonance SaaS platform is trusted by over 225 top retailer sites generating over $20 billion online in 2009 and includes the #1 retailers in Apparel, Specialty, Office Supplies, Luggage, Skincare and multiple other categories.

Certona offers custom personalization solutions for sophisicated merchants doing over $5M in annual revenue.

Any existing customer of SingleFeed can activate these feeds by upgrading their service plan. If you’re a not yet a customer of SingleFeed but would like to know more, please contact us by filling out our Demo request form.

We finally did it. With your help, we re-built our reporting system from the ground up; and we hope you like it!

As many of you know, we’ve been working our process for quite some time. We not only wanted to build a reporting system that was aesthetically pleasing, we also wanted it to be functionally appropriate for how you do business. Many of you, from companies large and small, and across a spectrum of industries, answered our surveys, met with our account management team, reviewed draft screenshots, and kicked the tires of our demo system. Thank you. We couldn’t have done it without you!

But allow me to share some of the aspects you may not be aware of.

If you’ve ever used our previous reporting, then you probably noticed that instead of taking many minutes simply to get an initial blank report-configuration screen, you immediately see an overview report with data, and a graph to boot –all in well-under a minute. In order to make this possible, we redesigned our reporting database using some data-warehousing techniques using “fact” and “dimension” table where we roll-up reports on a nightly basis, so that your experience is performant and enjoyable.

And, of course, we added those useful visuals to the top of each report. Now, at a glance, you can tell what’s going on with your shopping campaigns. No need to break-out that calculator to decide if you need to act on your product feeds. It’s all there in graphical form –particularly for those of you who (like me) process information visually.

And, if you’re wondering how we made those charts, checkout www.raphaeljs.com — the open-source javascript-based vector graphics library we used

And, of course, we cleaned-up the design of our pages, making them easier to maintain, and more compatible with your browsers. We did this with by using a combination of Ruby on Rails, Jquery and RaphaelJS. (As a matter of fact, we were pleasantly surprised to discover that the reports even work on our iPhone(s)!)

Finally, just three weeks after the introduction of this new reporting solution, we provided the ability to export your reports (we now process these requests in the background) — a major architectural change that I hope to write more about in the future. And we added an initial version of sku-suppression — a feature to help you better control your costs.

So what’s next? Yes, despite all that, we’ve got more coming.

I’ll mention two and whet your appetite with a leading-question on the second one:

• rule-based sku-suppression

and, one of my favorites:

• industries reports

(Let’s say you sell shoes.) Wouldn’t it be great to know which shopping-engines have proven most profitable for the shoe-industry?

Well, thanks again to all of you, our customers. We look forward to bringing you more of the features that have helped make SingleFeed synonymous with the phrase, “Comparison Engines Made Easy”.
Best Regards,
Jonathan Thomas

This summer, SingleFeed’s engineering department migrated our systems from a dedicated hosting provider. Our web application and back-end feed processing is now done on virtual servers running on Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform, where we’ve joined companies such as the Washington Post, Harvard Medical School, Virgin Atlantic, and Autodesk in taking advantage of the expandability and flexibility of cloud computing.

What does this mean for our merchants? Most importantly, the ability to instantly add new resources to our system enables us to grow as needed to continue offering prompt feed processing and engine delivery. In fact, since moving to EC2 we’ve already transparently upgraded several of our servers, and in each case it took only a few minutes. Back when we were running on dedicated hardware, that process would have begun by requesting a new server, followed by days to get it installed and configured before we were even able to begin using it.

We’re also able to set up server instances for testing on demand, allowing us to explore new ways of providing better service for our customers. It’s marvelous to be able to create an exact clone of our system whenever we want to try out a new approach, and then just let the instances vanish when we’re done.

As we continue to grow, we’ll take further advantage of this flexibility to provide greater power for parsing, analyzing, and delivering our customers’ data feeds.

SingleFeed is very excited to announce that we have successfully completed the upgrade of our core architecture.  The immediate benefits to you, the merchants of SingleFeed, are the:

1. noticeable speedup in the website (singlefeed.com),
2. accelerated processing of your feeds, and
3. ability to handle much LARGER, CSV formatted, product feeds.

Our great success has been one of our challenges.  We are also proud to announce we can handle much, much (much) more simultaneous processing of product feeds — without impacting your experience at SingleFeed.com!

In addition, our new architecture also perfectly enables us to accelerate the introduction of new features and functionality to the SingleFeed service.  Stay tuned for more very cool details along that front.

Until then, enjoy all of the improvements at SingleFeed.

Jeremy Horn
SingleFeed

SingleFeed places no limits on the size of the product feeds that can be submitted. As a SingleFeed merchant, you can upload a file of unlimited size to us. (please be patient, the big files take a while to upload and process)

That being said, there are some temporary constraints that we have in place. The Excel file format is currently limited to only 5MB in size. For the moment, this is because of the technology constraints imposed on us by the libraries currently used in our development environment.

For all non-Excel file formats, there are no size restrictions.

To work around the Excel file size limitation, we recommend you save the file format in a CSV (comma delimited) or TSV (tab delimited) file formats — both formats can be generated by selecting ‘Save As’ within Excel (if you are seeking to convert an Excel file, of course). I will be blogging about how to easily create and edit your CSV file in an upcoming post.

Enjoy.

Jeremy Horn

SingleFeed

An especially useful feature regarding the ability to submit your feed via HTTP or FTP is the ability to enable recurring Auto-Download of your feed information.

When Automatic Download is enabled we check your feed at various times throughout the day. If we determine that there have been changes to your feed since you last submitted to us, we then automatically detect, download, process, and submit your latest product information.

Important: After you have enabled auto-download, you MUST complete one successful feed submission via the Product page interface for the Automatic Download feature to be fully enabled for your account.