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!

For years I’ve wanted to bring the shopping engines and merchants closer together. This new Yahoo! Group is an attempt to do just that: get the decision makers – big and small, merchant or shopping engine – in the same (virtual) room to discuss the most important topics, best practices, network, help each other out, and more.

This group will be moderated and access restricted to those who are serious about learning and helping others. This is not a group about selling your wares.

Sign up now by going to the Yahoo! Group today.

We accidentally introduced an issue yesterday when making an update to the condition field such that any products listed as “new” will return as errors when importing.  Many of our merchants, especially those using the auto-download functionality, will receive email alerts notifying them of this.  Your condition field may be blank or contain the word “Newew.”  We are working to fix this ASAP and should have it resolved by the end of the day.  Please rest assured that this will not negatively affect any of your data on the shopping engines.

A quick note to let all of our merchants know that Nextag seems to be experiencing an issue with updating information in their account center.  Almost all of our merchants’ feeds are listed in Nextag’s account center as last imported on July 7th, 2009… when in fact we have been delivering the files daily.  We have seen this issue once before with Nextag so we are working with them to ensure that they are aware of, and working on, the problem.  It’s unclear at the moment if feeds have continued to be processed daily and it’s simply the account center interface that is incorrect, although this was the case the last time it occured.  As always, don’t hesitate to file a support ticket or contact your account manager with any questions or concerns.

-Colin

Quick Update:  NexTag tells us it’s a display issue only - within the NexTag account center.  They say feeds are being imported daily and they are working to correct the display issue.

- Ben