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Posts Tagged ‘Data Feed’

How To Manage Your Price Comparison Data Feeds

November 18th, 2009

What’s The Problem?

Every eCommerce business wants to advertise on as many channels as possible. When it comes to comparison shopping, you will want to syndicate your products to the top shopping engines. The problem is that every comparison shopping engine has a different data feed format and category structure. This creates an extra headache for the business owner. You have no choice if you want your products on their site…

The Many Solutions

Depending on the size of your company and your skill set, you have many different options ranging from hacking scripts and full service management.

D.I.Y. Style

Download your products into Excel and copy and paste until you got it right. Any business that means business cannot do it this way. It is too time consuming and you won’t be able to update it often enough.
Hack together some scripts to automatically create the files for each CSE. You get bonus points for automatically uploading to each CSE via FTP.
Use a third party self service tool to syndicate your feeds self service style. MerchantAdvantage is a great desktop tool for this, it is priced at $695 per month with no limits on websites, products or CSEs.

Third Party Syndication

Use a third party system to automatically create and syndicate many feeds from one file that you upload. This is ideal for smaller eCommerce sites with approximately 5-10k products. Here are some companies that provide this service:

GoDataFeed — Plans available for $50/$75 per month, with a 5,000 SKU limit.
SingleFeed — Plans starting at $99 per month, with a 100,000 SKU limit.
VersaFeed — Plans starting at $195 per month, with a 10,000 SKU limit.

Full Service Syndication & Managment

I would suggest using a small but reputable agency to syndicate your feeds, they are generally prices better than the big guys but give you a lot of personal attention. Here are a couple of such companies:

Another option is to go with a full service management solution from one of the big guys. I’ve had pretty good success with ChannelAdvisor specifically.

Do you have any experience with any of the companies listed above? Do you know of another company that provides such a service? Please let us know in the comments.

Photo Credit: alles-schlumpf

3 comments »

Posted in Comparison Shopping

Tags: CSE Data Feed Price Comparison Shopping Comparison Engines

Product Categorization On Comparison Shopping Engines

October 6th, 2009

Categorizing your products properly on each comparison shopping engine is one of the most important parts of your product listings. Sometimes having a product in the wrong category can get you many wasteful clicks and will cost you an arm and a leg at the same time. On the other hand, having your product in the correct categories will get you more relevant clicks with a higher chance of converting into a sale.

There are a couple of ways to ensure that your products are displayed in the correct categories.

Manually Tag Items

Most shopping cart systems allows for many product attributes. You can use this to create a hidden attributes for each product, and then set the value of each comparison shopping engine category name or ID number. You want to do this inside of your shopping cart system so that the data is saved and exported with your newly generated feeds.

This solution is ideal for small product catalogs where entering the information manually is easily done.

Map Categories

If you have many products and entering the category information one by one is not an option, try mapping your categories for theirs. You will basically create a list of all your categories and the corresponding CSE category. Every time you generate your feed files, have it look up the category name based on your mapping.

If All Else Fails

Alternatively you can just submit your category names and let the CSE do the mapping. Just keep in mind that this may have poor results.

If you utilize your own category names in your feeds, you will want to bid 0.00 on any items that somehow wind up in completely irrelevant categories. This will save you from unnecessary spend.

Bottom Line

Do it once and do it right.

3 comments »

Posted in Comparison Shopping

Tags: Comparison Shopping Engine CSE Data Feed

How To Lower Costs On CSEs With An Inclusion Only Feed

August 24th, 2009

When you have a large feed, there is usually a very long tail of products that send traffic to your site. Sometimes you can get one or two clicks on a thousand different products. You may not notice the cost of each click on it’s own, but it starts to add up. With a standard Kill Report it’s hard to get rid of the long tail because you don’t have enough metrics.

When & Where

In extreme cases where you cannot stomach the excessive costs of a specific shopping engine (CSE) and you are unable to lower the spend through other methods, it is recommended to send a feed with only the brands that have performed well historically. Keep in mind that by running an inclusion only feed, you are also getting rid of products that may perform well. So keep testing the feed by adding new products and monitor it for changes.

Bottom Line

You might stop a lot of quality traffic by sending an inclusion only feed. You might also save your business a ton of money. Keep your eyes open and watch the performance.

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Posted in Comparison Shopping

Tags: Comparison Shopping Engine CSE Data Feed Inclusion Long Tail

Get Your Products Listed First On PriceGrabber

August 5th, 2009

Being a new merchant on most comparison shopping engines can be frustrating because when you have no click through history or ratings your products show up pretty far down on the page. There some tricks you learn along the way, here is one that can be helpful for comparison shopping engines that group merchants offering the same product on to one page. PriceGrabber is the first to come to mind.

Product Research

The first thing to do is research your product category and look for trends on how the search results are displayed. You are looking for this:

PriceGrabber: First Result From Group Of Sellers

Most consumers will click on the first result, that’s where you’ll want to be.

Top Placement

In order for PriceGrabber to show your product with the first results of grouped merchants, you’ll need to make sure that you are using the same SKU as well as brand name spelling. If you have the same info, you’ve done it, you will now be in the first result.

Stick Out

Now you are on the first search result, you’ll want to try and get you products to stick out from the other merchants on the pages. You can do this by adding your logo or a discount promo message.