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For those of you who missed our Shopping Engine Success for Yahoo! Stores webinar, or want to catch it again, head over to Rob Snell’s website or watch them below.

http://www.robsnell.com/singlefeed-webinar.html

While there may be no hard evidence or actual cases that prove the shopping engines don’t like excessive capitalization, we do know it definitely degrades the shoppers experience to a degree. Google Merchant Center’s Program Policies state “Use Standard Spelling and Grammar. Avoid any repeated and unnecessary use of punctuation, capitalization or symbols.” We’ve seen merchants delivering product feeds to the shopping engines that have products in all capital letters.

Observe- The result from Amazon is listing a remote control Ferrari and the whole title is in caps. This is not a good idea. First, your listing stands out like a sore thumb in the results page.  I know that the words red and Ferarri may elicit extreme excitement and enthusiasm, but there is no need for all the characters to be capitalized.

There are exceptions where capitalization makes sense, like when dealing with model numbers, brands w/ all caps names, and other abbreviations or shorthand.  In this case, a search for “Kingston 1gb ddr2 ram” returns the following snippet of results. You can see that it makes sense to include capitalization on the GB, DDR2, RAM, and also the model numbers.  Pay attention that RitzCamera fails to capitalize their model number ktm28652g in the product title. When viewing all the results for this product search, you’ll see that the other merchants (like Geeks.com) use full capitalization for their model number.

In short, DON’T USE ALL  CAPS, and don’t use all lowercase either. Be sure to use proper spelling too!
A quick tip- In Microsoft Office Excel, you can use the formula “proper” to correct any text that needs fixing.

When thinking about data feed optimization (DFO), the first step we talk about at SingleFeed is proper engine set up and feed delivery.  Did your products actually go live on the shopping engines?

The second step in DFO is the quality of the data feed.  Are you including more than just the basic product attributes?  Are you categorizing all your products properly?  Do your titles and descriptions include proper keyword phrases?  And lots lots lots lots more!

But as we move into the holiday shopping season where clicks and click costs increase, merchants need to give some thought to a third step: Quantitative Data Feed Optimization.  While that sounds fancy, I’m just talking about doing some basic math to make sure you’re not wasting money on the shopping engines.  For example, if you get 400 clicks/month on engine X for product Y and it’s costing you $0.40/click, and you’re not recording any sales through those clicks, then maybe you should suppress that SKU from that shopping engine.  Each merchant will have a different profit margin, but the basic rule applies that if a product is not performing at all on a shopping engine, the maybe you shouldn’t send it to that shopping engine.

Some data feed management companies jump right into this type of quantitative optimization without first concentrating on the quality of the data feed, which means that they are suppressing SKUs unneccesarily and usually cutting your catalog in half.  That’s wrong.  However, if you’ve put in the time and effort to provide the shopping engines with great data, and you’re not seeing the results, don’t be scared to suppress some SKUs.  Some products just won’t work on all the shopping engines.  That’s fine.  It gives you the opportunity save money or shift that ROI negative spend to a better performing product.

The next 10-12 weeks can mean everything to some merchants, as it’s not uncommon for select retailers to earn 60-80% of their annual business from Q4 holiday shopping. What better way to ensure you’re getting the most from your comparison shopping engine feeds than by asking us for feed advice! We’ll be responding to merchant’s questions and providing tips and feed advice for the next few weeks, so send us your questions.  Simply reply with a comment to this post and we’ll respond with another comment or maybe a whole new post if we think the subject is valuable!

So there are just 30 days until Black Friday, and a few more than that until Cyber Monday. You’ve hopefully got all your ducks in a row for holiday promotions, shipping, and are prepared for the increased traffic and sales. You have Google AdWords campaigns primed and ready to go, and you’re probably encouraging your affiliate partners with commission incentives. It’s the calm before the storm, the troops (you and your ecommerce team) have dug in to the trenches and are ready for the wave of shoppers, warehouse shipments, and customer support inquiries. Have you checked your shopping engine data feeds? What are you doing to optimize your products on the shopping engines like Google Product Search, Nextag, Yahoo Shopping or Pricegrabber? What about ensuring your shopping engine accounts themselves are ready for the holidays? Here are some tips for your Holiday Comparison Shopping Engine Campaigns. You can also review Ben’s post from last holiday season.

Check your feed for:

• Accurate prices – Double check the price for your products in the feed and on your website. During the holidays we recommend daily uploads of your feeds to ensure accurate
• Working URLs – We recommend taking a few minutes to spot check product urls in your feeds on a regular basis. This will prevent you from submitting broken feeds which could be very costly.
• Stock status – Uploading your feed daily ensures you’re posting the correct stock status and/or quantities to the shopping engines. You wouldn’t want to keep paying for clicks on an engine when the product isn’t in stock and the order cannot be fulfilled.
• Spelling/grammatical errors – No one ever wants to see typos and misspellings in your product data, and why submit poor data to the engines (especially paid engines).
• Google Base Expiration Date – If you don’t update your feed regularly (which you should) then when was the last time you submitted to Google Product Search? Check your expiration dates on your product listings, it would be bad if your items expired because their 30 days was up.

Check your shopping engine account for:

• Sufficient funding – CPC based shopping engines should have sufficient funds so that your account doesn’t run out and your listings go offline during peak holiday shopping. We suggest using the auto replenish feature which is available in most shopping engine account centers.
• Store information – the shopping engines allow for you to post your store’s support phone/email, return policies, payment methods and more. Be sure this information is up to date.
• Tax and Shipping – We’ve posted on this before and encourage you to update (or plan to) your shipping rates as needed.
• Promotional Messaging – There may be special programs or messages you can display with your listings like “Free Shipping”, displaying a logo, or phone number.
• Poor performing products – Products that don’t convert well on your site or other marketing channels need to watched carefully so that you’re not wasting money. Remove them from your feed and investigate after the holidays.

If  any of this sounds overwhelming, or you still have questions, consider the help of SingleFeed to submit, manage and optimize your listings not only for the holiday season but year round. Many merchant’s are benefiting from our product categorization, correct wizard, optimization and regular submission. Ask us how we can help.

Merchants who sell products that are gender specific are off the hook. You don’t have to say “Women’s nail polish” or “Women’s bikini”. The same thing applies to men’s products like cumberbunds, neck ties, and boxer briefs. The gender for those products is inferred. Merchants who sell products that are not explicitly unisex should always specify which sex the product is intended for. If the product is unisex, mention it.

Examples:

Shoes: I see this happen a lot. Whether it’s Birkenstock Sandals, Nike running shoes, or Converse chucks  – It appears most “birks” are unisex. There are also sandals that are for men or women only. It wouldn’t make sense when a male visitor lands on a product page to know ahead of time what gender of shoe/sandal he’s looking. If I landed on a page and the available sizes ranged from 4-7 I’d bounce from the page and search elsewhere since it’s not evident these shoes are for me based on size options. In some cases Converse Chuck Taylor shoes are unisex, other times they are for men, or women based on size or style or color.

Clothing: Most retailers do a good job at this and specify who the item is for. Try a search for “v neck cardigan” and you’ll find results that don’t specify. Target,  Alloy, Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue are all guilty for not telling the shopper if the item is men’s or women’s in the title. Try another search for “levi jeans” and you’ll see Macy’s, Target, and Nordstrom’s all forgetting to include gender.

Towards the end of August, Google Base asked that merchants begin sending higher quality images. This is a great move forward for the user (shopper) experience when they can see higher resolution, larger images instead of tiny thumbnail sized ones. I wanted to take a moment to remind merchants that while images for Google Base may be optional, you should ALWAYS include them. Product images are also a field that is required with other comparison shopping engines, so if you are only on Google Product Search and want to be on Pricegrabber, Shopzilla, or Amazon Product Ads and don’t have images you won’t be able to list. Google is asking that images be at least 300×300 pixels, but we also suggest that you don’t submit images that are insanely large dimensions and file sizes. As for the file size, we recommend common file types such as .jpg or .gif. Formats such as .png or .tiff are larger in file size. The reason you want to keep file size down, is that it consumes your server bandwith when the shopping engines are showing your images. Remember that while on the comparison shopping engines this is the shopper’s first exposure to your website and the products you sell. If you have poor or no images, the shopper is likely to skip your listening and choose a competitor’s product.

If you want more resources about product images check out the following links:

• Get Elastic – How Top Retailers Show Product Images
• GrokDotCom – Changing Your Product Image Can Boost Sales by 147%
• Practical eCommerce – Optimizing Your Product Images

Recently we started working with a merchant who sells products on their site but they had not been including the type of product in the title/name of the item on the site or to the shopping engines. It was obvious at their website what they sell, but they weren’t conveying to the visitors, what the products were by their titles. Thus I was inspired to share and post.

If you sell mattresses, you better include the word mattress in your product title. If you sell electric toothbrushes, you better include the word “electric toothbrush” in the product title. If you sell Levi’s Jeans you better include “jeans” in the title. While you the merchant might think it is completely clear that AffordablePortableWidgets.com only sells a specific type widget, the shopper may not when searching on a comparison shopping engine. If you (the merchant) leave out the type of item, all a shopper is left with is a product result that leaves the shopper blind to the whole look, feel, and evidence of a theme on your website unless they click the listing and visit. Don’t just use a brand and a model number, but be sure to include the product “type” in the product name. By including the product type in the name, shoppers get confirmation that this indeed is the item they are looking for, and merchants get their products included more frequently in searches. I’m not going to go into the lengthy explanation of how search phrases and queries change and get more specific through the shopping/buying cycle online, but many merchants often miss out on being displayed for a product search simply by assuming the shopper knows what they want and are at the end of a search buying cycle. The CSE’s give you more of an opportunity to use “broad” type keywords that would typically cost much more than an exact match keyword in Google Adwords. Take the opportunity to include more generic keywords like the product type in the titles on the shopping engines.
Examples:

- a nameless merchant who sells only toothbrushes and teeth cleaning products has a “Oral-B Vitality Sonic” for sale, but they should be listing the product as “Oral-B Vitality Sonic Electric Toothbrush”

- another well known merchant who sells golfing equipment is listing a “Titleist Pro V1″ but doesn’t include the product type such as “Titleist Pro V1 Golf Balls”.

We see lots of product feeds everyday. One field that we see and frequently scratch our heads over is the color field. We strongly recommend this field for all of our clients, but push even harder for clothing and apparel merchants include their product color. One problem with this is that merchant’s will have some uncommon color names for their products which people may not use when they search.

For example, a search on Google Product Search for “Nine West brown sandals” returns 415 results. Another search for “Nine West mocha sandals” returns only 55 results. One could argue its better to stand out and compete in a smaller list of results, but I argue that more people are searching for the common color “brown” than the synonym “mocha”. Evidence from a Google Trends search show no results for “mocha sandals”.

Some examples of the common color and their synonyms would be:

Red = rose, rouge, crimson, scarlet, sangria, burgundy
Orange = amber, tangerine, pumpkin, persimmon, rust
Yellow = lemon, chartreuse, gold, saffron
Pink = coral, magenta, rose, salmon, fuchsia
Green = jade, lime, olive, moss, hunter
Blue = cerulean, cyan, turquoise, teal, azure, periwinkle, cornflower, cobalt, sapphire
Purple = amethyst, eggplant, indigo, lavender, violet, mauve
Black = espresso, carbon, charcoal, ebony, onyx, obsidian
Brown = auburn, bronze, burnt umber, rust, sepia, sienna, tan, taupe, chocolate

We recommend testing the replacement of different synonyms in your product titles with more common color names. This testing is the only way to determine what is right for your products. You can also include additional keywords in your feed for the other color names, and some merchants may be able to take advantage of NRF color codes.