Going over merchant data feeds every day begins to give one a sixth sense on how to concoct the ideal product name (some CSE’s refer to it as “title”). The product name is one of the most important attributes in your feed. The best ones are concise, but at the same time keyword-rich. Here’s a formula that will help you stick to our recommended style:

“Manufacturer Adjective Adjective Noun”

So one example would be, “Annie’s Homegrown Organic Mac & Cheese”. If the product has a recognizeable manufacturer part number (as in a searchable keyword), include that as well: “Sony MDR-110LP Open-Air Stereo Headphones”. You can have more adjectives if necessary. And if the product in question offers various size, color, or other options, you may list that out after the noun. So the first example above may be better listed as “Annie’s Homegrown Organic Mac & Cheese 6 oz.” The last piece of advice we can give is that you should make your product name as readable and intelligible as possible:

-Strip out ALL CAPS.
-Take out unneccessary punctuation (!,?, etc).
-And refrain from promotional text (Free Shipping for xample).

The key to remember here is that you want to first make sure your product name is truly descriptive of the product in question. The reader most be able to realize in an instant what the product is. Second, you want to include relevant keywords so your product is picked up by the CSE search algorithm when users search for those terms. And remember this is just a general guideline. Not all the CSE’s are the same and therefore one product name at Google Base might not do as good at Shopping.com. You need to test, test, test. Speaking of Shopping.com and data feed optimization tips, see our previous post outlining their recommendations as well.

Disclaimer: All optimization strategies are suggestions and do not guarantee success.

As I mentioned back in November, Yahoo Shopping, PriceGrabber, TheFind, and MSN Shopping have green sites. Now we can add Shopzilla to the list.

In celebration of Earth Day (April 22, 2008), Shopzilla launched Everyday Green Living.

Take a look at the different sections (Everyday Green, Green Kitchens, Green Bedrooms, Clothing & Beauty) and optimize your titles and descriptions to get included in these areas.

For example, Lake Champlain Chocolates sells Organic Chocolate and because of the titles/descriptions in their data feed, you can find their listings under Shopzilla’s Organic Chocolate or Fair Trade Chocolate section.

Don’t expect inclusion in one of these Green areas to solve all your shopping engine problems, but paying close attention to these merchandising sections can provide a healthy boost to your traffic.  And a lot of times it just comes down to making smart choices with keywords in your data feed.

The next big shopping holiday is Mother’s Day.  Most of the major shopping engines will launch Mother’s Day sections in a couple weeks.  If you have the perfect Mother’s Day present, don’t be shy about it.  Use the keyword phrase ‘Mother’s Day’ in your title, description, and any other applicable fields.

A long time ago (in 1973) grocery stores across the country had a problem - “How do I keep track of all my products efficiently and accurately?”. This problem stemmed from a need for better bookkeeping and accounting control, as well as a need for better inventory management. A coalition of grocers worked with manufacturers to solve that problem. They invented the Universal Product Code or UPC. This code, when used universally across manufacturers, merchants, distributors and consumers, afforded everyone a more efficient means of managing and tracking their products. Nowadays, it also happens to be one of the ways that comparison shopping engines like Shopping.com, Google Base, NexTag, Shopzilla, PriceGrabber, and the rest of them identify and classify your products. They also use Manufacturer Part Number (MPN), International Standard Book Number (ISBN) , and other unique product identifiers that are generally classified as “Unique Identifiers”. So why do they do this?

First, it ensures your products are correctly categorized on the comparison shopping engines. With the correct Unique Identifier, the shopping engine (as well as Singlefeed) can more accurately pinpoint your product category. This means higher visibility for browsing shoppers (who shop by category, rather than by item). Similarly, if you and a few other merchants happen to sell the same product, by including the Unique Identifier you ensure that you’ll be included in the shopping engine’s merchant comparison page for that product. Say for example you sell the Apple Ipod Touch. And maybe there are 150 other merchants who also happen to sell it, but only 10 of which included the Unique Identifier in their feed for that product (for consumer electronics the most reliable is MPN). When a shopper types in “Ipod Touch” at a shopping engine, if you included the Unique Identifier in your feed, chances are you’ll be included with the 10 other retailers who included it in their feed. The other 140 merchants are left in the dust, potentially at the end of the search results.

Second, it affords shoppers the ability to search for products by the UPC or MPN. When a shopper is ready to turn into a buyer, they will often use the Unique Identifier to search for a store with the best price, highest store ranking, or best customer feedback. In the example above, once that shopper knows they’re going to buy the Ipod Touch, they may grab the MPN and scour Google Base for the best price. As a merchant, if you don’t include a Unique Identifier in your feed, you guessed it – you won’t show up in the search results. If you don’t have that information in your product database, figure out a way to include it for the future. Comparison shopping isn’t going away, and as more merchants jump on the shopping engine bandwagon, you can get a head start by including UPC’s, MPN’s and other Unique Identifiers in your feed.

Ciao, one of Europe’s leading shopping engines, is coming to the United States. To find out more about Ciao, read my post at ComparisonEngines.

Ciao US is not yet live and therefore SingleFeed isn’t officially supporting the engine. Before adding partners, we like to get to know the partner and make sure our merchants will be completely taken care of, but we wanted to at least pass along the special promotion that Ciao is running for merchants that sign up pre-launch (around February 7).

Email Markus Rottmaier @ ‘markus.rottmaier at ciao-group.com, tell him that LoveYourFeed sent you, and he’ll give you 3 months of FREE clicks. Ciao will run on a PPC basis like most US based shopping engines, so 3 months free is quite a steal.

Only time will tell whether Ciao will become a successful acquisition channel for merchants, but it can’t hurt to reserve those free clicks today.

In part 1 of my shipping cost post I discussed one of SingleFeed’s client’s concerns about how Shopping.com, and many other shopping engines, display shipping cost. That got me thinking about where, how and if each of the shopping engines display shipping information and, therefore, on which it is most important. Before getting into that, it may be helpful to take a step back and begin with some definitions. Although all of the shopping engines have different structures and layouts, they all have two similar types of result pages. The first you could call a “SERP” (search engine results page) or “pSERP” (product search engine results page). A SERP is the page that will be displayed after about 90% of searches on a shopping engine. These main result pages consist of multiple products. For example, if you search for “canon camera” you will see actual camera models and maybe some batteries, cases and other accessories. If any of these products are only available from one store, most shopping engines will have a direct click out to that store via a button saying something like “see site”, “buy now”, “shop here”, etc… If a product on the main SERP page is available from multiple stores, you will see a “compare prices”, “compare stores” or similar button. Here is an example of this type of results page on Pronto:

The “compare prices” button will take you to the second type of results page on the shopping engines. This is a “product page” and I’ve also heard it called a “merchant comparison table” or “compare prices page.” I mentioned that 90% of searches on a shopping engine will probably land you on a SERP page. The remainder of the time, if you perform a specific enough search like “canon sd400” (and the shopping engine can tell with certainty what product you are looking for), you may be taken directly to a product page, surpassing the SERP. The product page features just one product and a list of retailers selling it, along with their logo, price, promotional message, etc… Here is an example of a product page from Pronto:

I believe Pricegrabber is an exception in that they always create a product page for an item, even if it is only available from one retailer (although I think that’s only in tech categories). Adding one more level before a user can click out to a merchant certainly decreases the number of leads Pricegrabber will send (and the revenue they will make) but should increase the quality of the leads they send. Good for Pricegrabber. It’s nice to see a shopping engine focus on their merchants’ bottom line and not just their own. So, the “SERP” and the “product page” are the two main types of result pages on the shopping engines. It’s important to understand the two because each requires a different strategy in order to increase your store’s visibility… the ranking system is fundamentally different on each of these pages (one is ranking products and the other stores). So there are of course different optimization techniques required for each. That will be the subject of an upcoming post. For now, with these definitions solidified, we can talk about shipping cost (part 2)….

Ina Steiner over at AuctionBytes discusses Google Product Search merchant reviews after talking to Jerry Dischler (Group Product Manager for Google, responsible for Google Checkout and Google Product Search) and Tom Oliveri (Group Product Marketing Manager for Google, responsible for Google Checkout, Google Product Search, and Google Base).

Read her post.

We don’t cover the importance of merchant reviews enough here at LoveYourFeed.  Have to get on that.  Or maybe a shopping engine wants to contribute…

As most of you may know, a number of the big shopping engines have increased their minimum bid rates through the holiday season, some as much as 25%. That rate increase will be coming back down to normal levels in January. But beware! I just noticed this message from NexTag which translates as: “We automatically raised your rates through the holidays, but when the rate increase drops January 2nd, YOU must MANUALLY bring your bids back down to where they were before.” Seriously?

“…Please note that NexTag will not automatically lower rates on your behalf.”

They automatically raised them on your behalf. The least they could do is automatically lower them back to where they were just before the rate increase. Seems like an easy way to make a few more bucks to me. Merchants are still very busy during the month of January. I’m sure most merchants won’t be savvy and prepared to be logging in at the crack of dawn on January 3nd so they can bring their rates back down to where they were before the holiday. Please put it on your calendar!

A little while ago I wrote about a client who was not satisfied with the way Shopping.com was displaying shipping cost. They actually thought it may be negatively impacting their campaign performance, so they had SingleFeed remove that data from their Shopping.com feed. The results are in and the client reported a noticeable decrease in their product ranking. This is understandable because Shopping.com, and most other shopping engines, give ranking preference to items with complete tax and shipping information (they believe it provides a better user experience). Despite the visible difference, traffic volume only declined slightly. This could be misleading because their test was running during the beginning of the holiday shopping season, so they should have been seeing a nice bump. Therefore, relatively flat volume during this specific test could actually be indicative of a greater loss. The client also reported no significant change in the number of orders they received. If the number of orders stayed the same, and traffic declined ever so slightly, that would actually indicate an increase in their conversion rate, albeit small. Please don’t run out and remove shipping cost from your feed in hopes of an increased conversion rate based in this one, tiny test. The holiday season no doubt had an effect on their conversion rate, too… so there is a big unquantifiable variable in this A/B test. Nonetheless, the point is this: test for yourself. The results may surprise you. Test not only shipping cost, but the structure of your titles, your bid amounts, your images, your pricing, your promotional messages, etc… what works for some products or categories won’t work for others… and, likewise, a strategy that works on Nextag may not work on Pricegrabber. Also, removing shipping cost may not have as big an effect for our client (an apparel retailer) as it would for a big screen TV retailer, whose shipping costs are a much larger factor for their customers.

eBay has PayPal. Google has Google Checkout. And now Amazon will have Bill Me Later.

According to the press release via Techcrunch, Amazon will invest in Bill Me Later and also add Bill Me Later as a payment option on Amazon.com.

In the Shopping Search panel at SES, someone asked about these alternative payment options and which ones to go with, thinking that listing 7 different options was too overwhelming for the consumer. While I agree that just pasting all options on the checkout page can be confusing, the best response from the panel (I think it was Scot) was to test test test.

I think that these alternative payment options are great ways to increase conversion rate, but merchants will never know until they add the option and then do A/B testing to figure out the best way to present the alternative payment option.

With Google Checkout, there is an added concern about who owns the customer in the long run, but in the short to medium term, there seems to be a great opportunity.

Here are some stats from Bill Me Later:

-47% of Bill Me Later transactions from new customers
-46% higher repeat usage
-50%+ increase in average order value, up to 150% when combined with promotional financing
-Low operating risk, since Bill Me Later works with existing payment processes
-30-40% lower transaction costs

PayPal also claims that adding its Express Checkout button will:

-Improve conversion rates. Express Checkout conversion is 40% higher than other checkouts
-Increase sales by 14% on average

Merchants are always asking SingleFeed account managers for data feed optimization (DFO) tips. Well, sometimes the DFO advice is sitting right in the help section of the shopping engines. Here’s what Shopping.com has to say about optimizing feeds that contain non-productized products (clothing, accessories, etc.):

For these categories you can optimize your product names to make your listings more relevant. The preferred product name structure is:

[”Product Brand” “Descriptive Copy” “Product Type”]

Here are some examples of good product names that follow this structure:

Nike Shox Turboz Running Shoe
McCartney “Proud American” Dog Breed T-Shirt
Marvel Heroes Chess Set
Spalding Official Size Top Flite 100 Basketball

Keep in mind that you can only make a product most relevant to a specific search. For example, “Spalding Official Size Top Flite 100 Basketball” is great relevance if the shopper searches for “Basketball”, but the relevance is slightly lower if the shopper searches for “Spalding.” Product names should be specific and succinct. You can use product descriptions to include additional descriptive information.

In our non-productized categories, for most searches there are several ties for relevance. In the event there is a tie, here is the order of tie-breakers we use to determine who is listed first:

- Trusted Store
- Is the item In Stock
- Higher overall Store Rating
- Higher number of Store Reviews
- Displaying Tax and Shipping cost
- Is Add-On Logo turned on
- Higher Bid

For searches with less than four matches, all listings will be “Featured Products.”