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.

As with any complex system, at SingleFeed it takes some effort for us to track what’s going on, who’s working on what, and the status of things. For tracking new tasks, improvements we want to make, and, yes, bugs — it happens to the best of us — we’ve been using a web application called Jira. I’m a big fan of Jira, and have used it at several previous companies. It makes it easy to describe work that needs to be done, classify it by both type (task, bug, etc) and system component, and track what state it’s in: open, in progress, resolved, and so on. We can assign items to each other, get notifications when things change, link items together, and even vote on new features. Viewing reports of issues is easy, based on any criteria you can think of: date, state, owner, component… And then we can track releases by assigning issues to upcoming release dates, so everyone can see what’s coming up. Most importantly, Jira’s a very easy system to use, both for technical and non-technical members of the SingleFeed team.

How does one find the time to manage all the marketing and sales activities to ensure that traffic and orders are coming through the door? Everyday there are hundreds of distractions and responsibilities that demand your attention. Managing data feeds for the comparison shopping engines shouldn’t be one of these. That’s where we come in, but we’ll save the shameless self-plug for later in this post.

I constantly find myself searching on Google for tips and shortcuts that can help save me time and energy. When you start to repeat the same task over and over enough you’ll start thinking to yourself “gee, activitiy x sure takes up a lot of my time each day”, you’ve already began the hunt to find an efficiency for that task. It’s why there are automatic sprinkler timers and self-cleaning litter boxes. What’s that, you want more real-life online applications? There are plenty of great tools out there for online junkies like us; there are thousands of FireFox browser plugins for any conceivable problem, Twitterfeed for automatically Tweeting when you have a new blog post, heck what about feed readers? The list goes on and on. Yet there are some tasks that there just aren’t a lot of tools available for to help save time.

Over at PowerReview’s office here in San Francisco, I saw a big, highly visible banner that read “Work smarter, not harder”. That motto has been one of the newer one’s we’ve adopted this year at SingleFeed. Finding ways internally to work smarter and more efficiently, while still helping our clients save time and money as well when it comes to getting up and running on the comparison shopping engines. Our core value proposition to use one feed for multiple shopping engines. Every step forward in efficiency for us is also a step (or two) forward for our clients. Take for example system alerts that allow us to respond quickly to a problem with a merchant’s account before they even realize it. We’ve just saved an hour or more of work for our team, and saved the merchant from losing out on traffic and sales to their site. It’s a win-win situation. We’ve built our MegaTaxonomy tool which makes it quicker and easier for us to get a merchant’s products categorized, saving the merchant from hours of work themselves. We’re building better reporting to make it quicker to view your performance and find areas of opportunity on the shopping engines.

Why hassle with building a data feed, formatting that data feed, categorizing that data feed, uploading and re-uploading? It might take 4 hours to get up and running on each shopping engine yourself. Multiply that by 10 shopping engines and you’ve just spent a full work week just to try and get started. Don’t forget you will still have to maintain each of those shopping engine feeds and upload them regularly, that’s another few hours every week. Build just one. We’ll send it to over a dozen comparison engines, and do all the tedious work and heavy lifting like daily submission, categorization, validation and formatting. You can focus on those other important marketing activities and maybe sneak in a early weekend and leave the office chanting aloud to your coworkers “Be Efficient. B-E-Efficient!”

In my Search Marketing Now presentation last week, I started off with a calendar to get merchants prepared for the holiday shopping season. Here are some of the key dates to think about:

-Halloween – October 31 (40 days!)
-Holiday Shopping officially begins – November 1 (41 days!)
-Thanksgiving – November 26 (66 days!)
-Black Friday – November 27 (67 days!)
-Cyber Monday – November 30 (70 days!)
-Hanukkah – December 11 (81 days!)
-Christmas – December 25 (95 days!)
-Kwanza – December 26 (96 days!)
-Gift card redemption season – All January!
-Valentine’s Day – February 14 (146 days)

Things to think about:
-when is your official last ship date to guarantee delivery for Christmas
-Hanukkah is much earlier this year
-why leave Black Friday to the offline retailers – run your own Black Friday promotion online!
-don’t let Shop.org’s CyberMonday.com site or deal/coupon sites steal your thunder. Run your own Cyber Monday promo!
-don’t forget about January…do you have a solid cross sell/up sell strategy for all those shoppers redeeming their gift cards?

SingleFeed is very much like the many small and medium sized businesses that we help; we’re a scrappy start up with lofty ambitions. We might have taken venture capital (from our friends at KPG Ventures and True Ventures), but that doesn’t mean that running this business is a breeze. Especially in these rough and uncertain economic times, I’ve picked up a lot of valuable lessons, some of which I thought you might find valuable in running your business. So here’s the first one:

You need friends and advisors & you need to lean on them.

The life of a CEO can be a little lonely. While we have a great team here at SingleFeed, there are times that I need to check in with an advisor to get a fresh perspective. Often times this comes in the form of my Board; Craig Sherman, Dave Hills, and Jon Callaghan, but even more useful is to talk with other CEOs as they are living and breathing the same experience that I am.

But this post isn’t just for the CEOs out there. I’d highly recommend that everyone; from a young online marketing associate to a VP of IT – look to their counterparts at other companies for advice.

Everyone talks about networking in order to build business and that’s a great reason to get out there and network, but just as important is the opportunity to interact with a peer who can provide a perspective you might not normally have been exposed to. Even just the realization that you’re not alone can be extremely valuable.

Over at ComparisonEngines (http://comparisonengines.com/2009/07/01/dont-put-all-your-eggs-in-the-google-shopping-basket/) I wrote a blog post about not putting all your eggs in the Google Shopping basket. Basically, Google is doing a lot of experimentation with the placement of Google Product Search and the related Onebox results, so I recommended that merchants test out other shopping engines. We’re not the only ones who noticed that merchants were getting less clicks from Google Product Search. A couple weeks after my post ChannelAdvisor ran a webinar (http://www.csestrategies.com/cse/2009/07/google-product-search-webinar-next-week-how-to-counter-the-severe-drop-in-traffic-to-gps.html) on that same subject.

Even before Google Product Search began testing alternative placement for Onebox results, SingleFeed pushed merchants to test multiple shopping engines. And merchants who really want to grow their business picked SingleFeed Gold (https://www.singlefeed.com/services/gold_plan) because it allows them to submit to 17 shopping engines. Google Product Search might in many cases drive the most revenue to a merchant (out of all the shopping engines), but this isn’t always the case AND more importantly, there are at least five other shopping engines which can make or break a shopping engine campaign.

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s some aggregate data from July for our merchants:

For those merchants with SingleFeed’s tracking solution activated (AND you should have our tracking solution activated so we can help you optimize your campaign!), NexTag contributed the most revenue (25%), with Google Product Search coming in second (20%), and PriceGrabber (17%) , Shopping.com (13%), and Shopzilla (12%) rounding out the top five.

So if you’re only using Google Product Search, you’re potentially missing out on a lot of revenue. Everyone loves that Google Product Search is free, but ignoring the other shopping engines just because they work on a PPC basis can be detrimental to your business.

Another remindter to join Brian Smith and Marin Software in a webinar sponsored by Search Marketing Now tomorrow,  Tuesday, September 15, 2009 at 1 PM EST.  Take a look at ComparisonEngines.com blog for more details.

If you want some quick, actionable tactics for succeeding online this holiday shopping season, attend my Webinar, sponsored by Marin Software and hosted by Search Marketing Now.

The Webinar will cover a couple areas for internet marketing optimization: PPC Campaign, Comparison Shopping, Email Marketing, Analytics/Reporting, Conversion Rate, etc.

The Webinar is next Tuesday, September 15, 2009 @ 10AM PDT. Register today!

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!