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For some retailers, they only sell one type of product and it’s easy to categorize all their products for the shopping engines. For others however this can be an overwhelming task, especially if you have many products in a multitude of categories.

Proper product categorization is a critical foundation to a feed’s success on the shopping engines.  Check out this earlier post on data feed categorization for details.

Many CSEs have promo messaging fields to use things like FREE SHIPPING or GIFT WITH PURCHASE.  Be sure you are using a compatible promo message for each engine, as not all the messages can be used to every shopping engine.  Be careful when including promotional text in your product titles and descriptions themselves, as this violates the policies of engines like Google and your listings can be flagged for removal.

Many of the shopping engines have rather minimal requirements for images in your data feed. Use images of at least 300×300 pixels and dont use generic images or image place holders. Also be aware that a few of the CSE’s don’t allow watermarks on images either.  If you don’t have an image don’t make something up, or use a “no image available” image.

Here’s a link to an older post which has more details and suggestions.

Similar to your links breaking or listings coming down, verify that all your product bids are set. Any bids at the category or product level that are at a) zero, or b) below the min CPC will prevent your products from showing up. Many shopping engines also won’t list your new products unless a bid has been set on the category.

Do yourself a favor and login at least once this holiday season to verify. Also note that many of the CSE’s  raise the category bid for the holidays. You can check out a post over at SingleFeed about 2010 rate increases.

We recommend that you install the ROI conversion trackers for as many of the CSE’s you can. These benefit your relevancy for CSEs that use conversion information in their ranking algorithms. Don’t be concerned about them slowing your site down, just place them at the bottom of the conversion page in the code. That way if one ever hangs up, at least the whole page has loaded and the shopper won’t likely notice a single tracking pixel not loading.

We’ve posted on this in the past-  Nextag, Shopping.com, Become.com and Shopzilla are a few engines that have these ROI trackers available.

There is hardly anything worse than your website being down during the holidays.  Something that I’ve seen and experienced personally when it comes to using the CSE’s is when the urls are broken and the shopper clicks never make it to your website. Maybe it was a url tracking tag that broke, or your feed file somehow had improper urls, whatever the case you don’t want to have this happen to you especially during the holidays. You lose the clicks/visits and you spend click fees.

1. Check out this previous post on how to see if your products are live on Google Shopping.
2. Check Analytics click traffic daily by using url parameters or tags.
3. Setup Google Analytics alerts as explained in a previous post.
4. Run a small test and spot check product listings by clicking on them (this will cost you $ so click wisely).

Updating your shopping engine data feed frequently is important, especially during the holidays.

With increased web traffic and sales, you’re likely to be selling out of products or introducing new items for the holiday season.  You’re also likely to be changing prices and marking products as “on sale” and it’s imperative that you update feeds to the shopping engines so they have accurate information on your products. There’s almost nothing worse than a shopper clicking on a CSE ad (costing you $) to find the product out of stock or at a different (higher price). Many of the shopping engines do factor in the “freshness” of the data feed and take into account how old or stale a feed is and will deem your listings less relevant.

Even if your product information doesn’t change at all, we still suggest regularly updating your feed.  SingleFeed updates merchants feeds daily, and we would say that you should do weekly updates at a minimum.

A lot of merchants fail to use popular keywords in their product titles. This is one of the most common areas we see for merchants to optimize. I wrote a few posts in the past about product title optimizations in the past which I suggest you read.

The classic example is the fictitious website “VacuumUniverse”. They only sell vacuums and vacuum parts and accessories. The product titles they have use a name like “Eureka 1000″ or “Hoover UltraClean” but don’t use the word “vacuum” in them. When they send out their data feed they miss out on traffic for searches which contain “vacuum” or “vacuum cleaner”.

Go into your analytics reports  and get your top 10 keywords. Insert keywords into your products as you see fit.  This doesn’t mean go hog wild and stuff every product with you top keywords.  In the example above, it would make sense to add the word “vacuum” to your titles.

You could also use the product category as a keyword. If you sell blank media like cds and dvds then transform your product title from “TDK X213 50 pack” to “TDK DVD-R Media X123 50 pack”.  If you had used the first version and a shopper searched for “TDK DVD-R” your items wouldn’t show up.

Also try using Google’s new Instant Search and start typing in a keyword and see other popular variations you could use.

Collecting and maintaining user reviews and ratings is an important activity to participate in as a merchant. Let’s face it, there are probably dozens if not hundreds of merchants out there selling the same or similar products as yours. Why should they by from your store (aside from price)? Give them the confidence to buy from your store by collecting post-checkout reviews which are displayed in the search results on the comparison shopping engines.  Google Product Search does not have it’s own survey, but instead collects merchant ratings from a number of other comparison shopping engines, as well as Google Checkout. If you want merchant reviews on Google but aren’t offering Google Checkout as a payment option, you’ll need to institute the survey scripts from the other CSE’s.

Install 1 post-checkout review script:

Some merchants may only be using 1 shopping engine, or  only able to install 1 pop-up script. Install whatever review survey you can.  I recommend the Bizrate/Shopzilla one, as its reviews are collected and used on Google Product Search.

Install multiple post-checkout review scripts: If you have multiple scripts there are a few ways to go about handling the serving of these surveys.

1. Serve all scripts to pop-up (not advised)
2. Rrotate each script to take turns and pop-up (best approach)
3. Serve the script based on the last clicked source and pop-up (most complex approach).

Here’s a SingleFeed Support article about ROI trackers and Survey Tools.

Setting up Tax and Shipping – Looking to improve your conversion rates on the clicks that come from the shopping engines? Chances are you may not have ever setup tax and shipping rules for your comparison engine accounts when you opened them.  For some advanced merchants, you’ll want to control the tax and/or shipping costs in the data feed itself, but for less sophisticated merchants you can setup shipping rules from each CSE account interface in just a few minutes.  It’s important to set these values in your comparison engine accounts like Google Product Search, Nextag, Shopzilla, and Become.com. Each shopping engine should have a section in the account interface to setup or edit these settings.

Shipping Prices

1. Based of Product Price – If you use a simple shipping table with shipping cost based off the price of the product/order, then follow the steps to replicate that shipping table in your shopping engine accounts. It should only take you 2 minutes per shopping engines.
2. Based of Weight and Zip Code – Retailers who rely on carrier (UPS, USPS, FedEx) calculated rates based on weight and destination zip code will use this method. You will need to provide shipping weight in the data feed so the shopping engine can lookup the rates and estimate them for the shopper. This shipping cost is an estimate, it will likely be slightly off from the calculation on your website especially if you have discount UPS rates, or they add something else to their cart to increase the weight of the order.
3. Free or Flat Rate – If you ship all products at a flat rate (or free) then specify the shipping amount.

Note that if you have more than one of these methods offered you may have to provide shipping values in your data feed.

Tax

1. No Sales Tax – In some cases, you may not charge sales tax.
2. By State or Zip – You can specify the tax rates on most CSE’s by State and some offer tax rates by zip code.
3. Tax on Shipping – Some merchants also charge tax on shipping so be sure to set that up if available or applicable.