LoveYourFeed.com

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…