First off, I would like to take a minute to introduce myself.  My name is Angela Karst and I am the newest member of the SingleFeed account management team.  I am very excited to be a part of a great company that is offering such a valuable service to merchants.  I look forward to working with many of you very soon!

We here at SingleFeed are very excited to share with you a new feature that recently went live on our site.  We call this feature “data synchronization” or “data sync” and it allows you to maintain any fields that you have uploaded previously and ensure that those fields will not get overwritten the next time you upload a new file. This feature is useful if you need to manually add or customize certain fields that won’t be present in the file you will be uploading to SingleFeed on a regular basis.  For instance, if you are importing a Yahoo Merchant feed, you might find that a SingleFeed required column like “manufacturer” isn’t in your Yahoo feed.  In the past, every time you uploaded a new feed you had to manually go in and add the manufacturer field.  Now after your first upload you can enter your data sync settings and check the box next to the manufacturer field.  This tells our system to leave that field as is every time you upload a new feed, thus saving you a lot of time and energy! 

For more details on data sync, visit this link: 

https://www.singlefeed.com/?s=datasync_feature

We sent a note to all our merchants a couple weeks ago, but I wanted to remind everyone that we’ll be exhibiting at Internet Retailer in Chicago in 2 weeks.  We’re at Booth 1222.

This is a big leap forward for the company as it’s our first time exhibiting at any conference.

SingleFeed has been lucky enough to grow through word of mouth.  Compared to most companies in our space, we’ve spent pennies on marketing.  Since inception, I wanted to build a great product and have our merchants evangelize SingleFeed for us.  This has definitely been the case, and we’re organically growing at a nice clip.  So why the change?  Well, as I say with any marketing campaign, you have to test and track.  And if we’re going to test exhibiting somewhere, Internet Retailer is the place to do it.  eTail and Shop.org are also very important, but IR is the show for ecommerce in my mind.  And besides attracting new merchants, IR is a great place to catch up with current merchants, current and potential partners, and just generally spread the good word about our progress (and there’s been a lot - we’ll demo some important advancements at the show!).
So, if you plan to be in Chicago, please contact us, and we’ll set up a time to meet.  Hope to see you there!

Sorry for the lack of blogging - here, on ComparisonEngines, and on LoveYourFeed.  But just because you don’t see any blog posts, doesn’t mean we’ve been asleep at the wheel.  In fact, it’s been just the opposite.  We’ve been working extremely hard on building SingleFeed into a stronger business.  Some of that comes in terms of additional resources - and I’ll talk about those resources soon - but a lot of that comes in terms of releasing features, enhancements early and often while taking care of bug fixes immediately.
Since my last blog post (April 15), we’ve released the following major enhancements:

-Self Service Portal (immediate case submission to account manager, ability to view related cases and get right to the answer)
-Online knowledge Base (detailed SingleFeed instructions, helpful hints, commonly asked questions)
-SKU level reporting view (view product level clicks by engines to quickly determine which SKUs should be suppressed from your feed)
-Data Synchronization (SingleFeed now remembers your data (stay tuned for details!)

-Extension of cookie life (we’ve been under-reporting your sales - not good.  our reporting is now much more accurate)
In addition, there have been a TON of back end improvements, account management enhancements, and quick bug fixes.

In total, we’ve had 5 releases in the past 6 weeks, comprising 25 enhancements/new features and 21 bug fixes.  And that’s just the start!  We’re ramping up for the holiday shopping season and there are many exciting new features and enhancements on the way.  I promise that we’ll be much better at communicating these releases in a much more timely manner going forward.

One of the sessions I’m participating in next week at the Spring ECMTA Summit is on ‘new media’. Jonathan Garriss is giving me some room to play with this one, so I’ve set up a Facebook group. Please join here (or login to Facebook and search for eCommerce Merchants Trade Association).

You can also join SingleFeed’s Facebook group here (or login to Facebook and search for SingleFeed).

With lots of required fields containing dozens of rules, it’s sometimes hard to submit a proper data feed. SingleFeed does a ton of work behind the scenes to clean up your feed upon submission, but in many cases an upload will contain errors. We realize we need to make it easier for merchants to understand the feed errors and quickly resolve any problems.

Our Feed Format Advice page is just a small step to make your life easier.

After the upload, if your feed has significant errors, we’ll display a button to bring you to the advice page.

Once on the Feed Format Advice page, you might see a couple sections, depending on the types of errors in your feed:Required Fields, Formatting Issues, and Unrecognized fields.

Here are some examples:

SingleFeed requires merchants to enter ‘y’ or ‘n’ for Stock Status.  SingleFeed will make appropriate translations if a merchant enters ‘yes’ or ‘no’, but if we don’t recognize the value in the Stock Status field, we’ll return an error.  In this case, the merchant entered ‘maybe’:

SingleFeed requires 12 fields.  If any of those fields are left blank, we’ll return an error.  In this case, the merchant didn’t enter values for Category, Manufacturer, or Condition:

As with most of the work we do, we’ll continue to refine the Feed Format Advice page.  If you have any recommendations, please let us know.

Welcome to the new look of SingleFeed. We’re going to be iterating the design/UI a lot over the next couple months, but the basics are up and running. As Grant explains, this is only Phase 1. Phase 2, the new ‘logged in’ state, will launch next week. Also, we’re busy preparing lots of content for the new site, so the ‘coming soon’ pages will quickly be replaced.

Discuss the new design in the forum.

Thanks!

-b

You might have noticed that we added Sortprice to our list of supported shopping engines.  If you’re currently submitting to Sortprice, please note that we’re asking you to enter a new file name when you add your FTP credentials on SingleFeed’s Engine page.  This will help us notify Sortprice that a new feed from SingleFeed is on the way.  They’ll inspect that new feed before taking down your old Sortprice data feed.

For merchants new to Sortprice, we’ll have instructions soon up soon, but it’s fairly easy to get started.  Just go here and choose Basic or Enhanced listings.  Basic listings are free, but your catalog might not get complete exposure and Enhanced merchants will trump your free listings.  As opposed to most PPC shopping engines, Sortprice’s Enhanced listings are on an ‘all you can eat’ model.  You pay a flat monthly fee depending on the number of SKUs you’re submitting and the add-ons you want (logo OR logo + category logo).  You can view a rate care here.  After you sign up, you’ll get a quick response from Sortprice with next steps.
Once you activate Sortprice, expect your first feed to be sent to Sortprice within 7 days.  We will then update your product feed every 24hrs.

SingleFeed hasn’t added a shopping engine for a little while.  Well, in the next week we will add Sortprice.  While Sortprice might not be the most popular shopping engine, Doron, Asaf, and the rest of the Sortprice crew are dedicated to helping their merchants succeed and taking care of merchants along the way, goals that SingleFeed very much believes in.

We have a number of shopping engine requests on our list, and those of you who filled out the survey gave us lots of suggestions, but feel free to comment if you have a favorite shopping engine you want supported by SingleFeed.

Thanks!

-b

As you know, SingleFeed sends out your data feeds every 24 hours. While we thought our weekend release (January 27) went out without a hitch, it seems we were wrong and feeds were not processed and sent to the shopping engines on Monday, January 28 or Tuesday, January 29. Existing feeds remained live, but new or updated feeds were not processed during this time.

Your data feeds were processed and delivered this morning as soon as we discovered the problem.

I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused you. We are implementing new safeguards and better notification systems so that any future feed delivery problems are discovered and addressed much quicker. After about 180 days of no problems delivering feeds, we got a little lax. This won’t happen again.