Online Shopping Business

Froogle is now Google Product Search

admin — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 16:28:55 +0000

If you are sending products to the Froogle shopping portal, I am sure you already know that a rename happened last week. Froogle is now Google Product Search. If you were not sending products to Froogle, but planned to, don’t fret. You still use Google Base the same way to submit your products. So nothing seemed to change from the product submission side.

So what has changed? Besides the name, it appears that from reading Google’s “Back to Basics” blog post Google is focusing on the shopper’s user experience. Not an abundance of detail in the article. Deep down it appears that the Froogle brand may not have been getting it done. Having checked both sites I did not see a change in functionality or look and feel, but maybe the changes were behind the user interface.

For merchants, just keep doing what you are doing and keep in mind that Google is only human. They have to refactor things too. It takes iterations of development to get things right. In my opinion Google Base has one of the simplest product submission tools out there. Since it doesn’t cost anything to use, well except time, I don’t think we can be too critical.

Lions and Tigers and Datafeed Defined Oh My!

admin — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 21:18:01 +0000

Within the context of shopping comparison engines, what exactly is a datafeed?

A datafeed is a file containing relevant information about a merchant’s products. All data needed to successfully market a given product should be located in your datafeed.

What information is required when describing your product?

Shopping engines a.k.a shopping comparison engines each have their own requirements of what information is needed when submitting a datafeed. This information is located in what is typically called a specification document.

Each shopping engine has it’s own specification document that you can request. Typically, you have to register for a merchant account before you can get this information, but it is available. Once received, this document will list out the various data needed to get your products on the web. For instance, a shopping engine may ask you for your product’s title, description, link location, image link location, currency, brand and so on. An example of this is below.

How do I get my products uploaded?

Select the shopping engine destination of which you will send your products.
Register for a merchant account.
Enter as much information as possible about your products within the requirements of the shopping engine’s specification document.
Upload the data feed.
Verify product publishing.

Giddie up! At a high-level that is it. There are products that exist out there which will help make things easier for you when submitting data feeds to comparison shopping engines. These will be discussed in more detail later as an evaluation of the products has been collected.

Determining How to Submit Products to mySimon Delivered Fruitful Findings

admin — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 02:54:28 +0000

Comparison shopping engine mySimon was a target on my list of shopping portals. My initial research uncovered that mySimon was under a partner relationship with CNet. After having not been able to find the data feed specifications a sales email had to be sent to CNet.

Unlike some of the other engines I have contacted the folks at CNet responded quickly. Having settled with no responses or responses that came 7 to 10 days after my initial correspondence CNet bucked the trend by responding same day. Typically, this is a good indication of the type of customer service being provided. Something to keep in mind.

To get to the nitty gritty, if you are wanting to submit products to CNet Shopper you can refer to the following datafeed specification. For mySimon you can refer to the following CNet partner section.

Hopefully, this helps out. Having had to play the waiting game with a handful of engines it’s nice to get some immediate help from this company.