As I did research for my Oscar fashion post this morning (over at ComparisonEngines), it reminded me how important it is to use relevant keywords in the products and descriptions of your shopping comparison engine feeds.

While I think the shopping engines have to do a better job about merchandising around certain events like the Oscars, that doesn’t mean that merchants should sit back and wait for this to happen.

Searching for ‘oscar fashion’ on Google Base returns 397 results and most of the other shopping engines return Oscar beds.  This was a great opportunity for a merchant that sells Academy Award caliber dresses, heels, jewelry, etc. to come in and dominate for these searches.  While the number of searches might not have been that high, with enough preparation, the shopping engines might have gone out and purchased PPC ads on Google and Yahoo! to drive traffic to these listings (no guarantee here, but it’s a possibility).  At the very least, you would have been one of the very few companies to show up for ‘oscar fashion’ related searches.

So what’s the next opportunity to take advantage of?  Well, Spring is just around the corner.  Do you sell dresses or do you sell Spring Dresses?

While there are a number of improvements to talk about (online product editing), it’s really nice to see a link to ‘Remove Listings’.  Up until now, a user had to send an email in to get listings suspended.

Thank you, NexTag.

I’ve gotten a couple emails from people looking for help creating feeds (Catalogs) for Windows Live Product Upload as the list of required and optional data feed fields is lost at the bottom of the help section. I’m sending along some suggestions to the Product Upload team later this week and will let them know to call out this section better, but for now, I wanted to at least pass along the information.

There are currently 5 required fields:
-OfferName (aka product name)
-ActionURL (aka link for product)
-RegularPrice (aka price of product)
-ReferenceImageURL (aka image URL)
-OfferDescription (aka description)

There are also 5 optional fields:
-Brand
-CurrentPrice (if different from regular price)
-UPC
-ISBN
-AMGID (All Music Guide ID)
-MerchantCategory (merchant site categorization)

I’ll fill you in on the quirks of the system, but for now, wanted to make sure to get the basics out there. Now go and sign up.