Everyday at SingleFeed, we learn something new about the shopping engines because everyday our merchants (new and old) do unexpected things.

The most recent example was one merchant submitting ‘master card’ as a payment type. Well, since ‘master card’ should technically be ‘MasterCard‘ or at least ‘Mastercard’, one of the engines hiccuped upon feed submission; ‘master card’ was not recognized as a payment type and therefore none of the merchant’s listings went live.

SingleFeed checks to make sure that all feeds get up and running so we quickly figured out the problem and in a minute added a new rule to our correction/optimization engine to account for ‘master card’ and similar derivations. We do this a couple times a week and LOVE it when we discover new shopping engine ‘quirks’ (my favorite word when it comes to talking about the shopping engines). The more quirks we discover, the better it is for all our clients.
While I can’t tell you all the quirks we’ve discovered (hey, we do want you to sign up for our data feed optimization service), I’ll start sharing more of them with you. And if you have any you’d like to share with us, please comment below.

As a little incentive, anyone who posts a legitimate quirk (something not spelled out explicitly in a shopping engine specification document) will get a $5 Starbucks gift card (limit 1 per person).

SingleFeed has always taken Google Base’s product_type field seriously (it was a required field on SingleFeed long before Google Base made it a required attribute).  Now we’re getting reports from merchants that Google Base is taking down feeds for not properly using the the Product_Type attribute properly.

Google Base maintains a list of aprx. 450 approved product types here.  I don’t think that 450 product types completely covers the entire universe of products submitted to Google Base, so I suspect that Google Base won’t be that strict with this field in the short term.  However, as more and more merchant use this field and Google Base sees that everyone selling the K2 Pontoon Skis designates the product_type as ’skiing’, any derivation from that standard will probably cause a feed error.

Interestingly, as more and more merchants enter information and Google works with data authorities like Channel Intelligence, Google Base will eventually not need merchants to enter additional attributes like product-type because Google Base will already know the proper designation.

There are a lot of ramifications to this, but that’s for another post.  For now, pay attention to Google Base’s list of product types.