In the comparison shopping world, somewhere out there an online retailer is selling the same product you are. And that same retailer could be including more information in their data feed about that product than you are. If you want to compete for relevancy and rank at any comparison shopping site, you need to include as much information as possible about that product (also important that the information is accurate and intelligible). The more data you provide, the more opportunities you give the CSE’s search algorithm to find a match between your product and a shopper’s search term. And in theory, the more your product matches various searches, the more impressions and traffic you will get. Is there a priority list for these optional attributes? Well, as mentioned previously, you should include as much information as possible; include as many optional attributes as you can. But here’s a short list of the optional attributes with the most potential to improve your ranking. SingleFeed requires some of these attributes, but for the most part these are considered “optional” by a majority of the shopping engines. We think you ought to consider them “highly recommended”. 

– MPN/UPC/ISBN

– Manufacturer/Brand

– Shipping Cost

– Shipping Weight

– Promotional Message

– MSRP

– Sale Price

– Keywords

– Product Type (for Google Base)

– Length (Google Base only)

– Height (Google Base only)

– Width (Google Base only)

– Payment Accepted (Google Base only)

– Department (Google Base only)

If you sell clothing/apparel/shoes, you should also add Color, Size, and Gender to your list. Google Base supports a ton of additional optional attributes. The list is long, so for brevity’s sake, you can just go here to view them. Google also supports custom attributes, which we highly recommend you take a look at as well. If you want the quick nitty gritty on custom attributes, hop over to our blog post on them.

Throughout the process of Data Feed Optimization (or DFO), one begins to realize other factors, outside of the actual data feed, that can contribute to improved ROI on the shopping engines. One of the factors is your store name. This is the name that is displayed next to your product listing on a shopping engine. We have a number of recommendations we provide our merchants on the best way to optimize their store name for the shopping engines. Recently, Google began a campaign to clean up store names that don’t follow their guidelines. As an approved Google Product Search Partner, we wanted to highlight their recommendations, which we wholeheartedly agree with. As a general rule of thumb, these are great recommendations for any and all of the shopping engines out there. Their recommendations are posted below. Or if you rather, just visit their help page on this topic here.

“During the account registration process, you’ll be prompted to enter a display name for your store. This is the store name that appears next to your listings in Google Product Search. You can change your display name by clicking on the Settings tab, once signed in to your Google Base account.

When choosing your display name, please follow the guidelines outlined below:

-Enter the name of your store without any additional text. Please do not include suffixes like “Inc.,” “Co.,” or “GmbH.”

-Enter your website address only if you’re the only store on that website. If you do this, make sure it matches your actual website domain and don’t include “http://”. If you’re a marketplace seller that shares a website address with other sellers, simply use your unique store name instead.

-Ensure that you’ve correctly spelled your store’s name.

-Avoid unnecessary use of the following:

  –Promotional text (e.g. phone numbers, marketing messages, sale announcements)

  –Repeated and unnecessary use of punctuation, capitalization, or symbols (e.g., spelling your store name in ALL CAPS)

  –Copyright or trademark symbols

  –Offensive or inappropriate language

Additionally, please note that Product Search truncates display names that are longer than 20 characters.”
 

Shopping.com has changed their data feed specifications. They now accept 4 new fields (for apparel + shoes) and will begin displaying them on their site in early November.  The fields are:

Gender - The gender(s) for which the product is made.

Type - The type of product.

Size - All available sizes for the product.

Color - The color of the product. (Note from Shopping.com: While we will map color values to the most popular colors on shopping.com, you should provide the original product color to us. In the event that the product is multi-colored, please separate the colors with a slash (/).)

Shopping.com indicates that the most significant change is that they are now asking merchants to provide an individual record for each color in which a product is available, as opposed to one record with multiple colors listed. This will allow Shopping.com to accurately display color and size information provided by you.

If you’re a SingleFeed merchant, you know that our system already supports these fields. Now that Shopping.com supports them, too, we have re-formatted our Shopping.com feeds to include the new fields.  You don’t need to do anything!
If you use these fields currently, know that we’ll now be sending that information along to Shopping.com. If you’re not currently using these fields, and if you sell apparel or shoes, we highly recommend that you look into providing them!  Shopping.com will most likely create new filters based on these attributes, so if you’re not including this information you won’t show up in the filtered search results.

You can review Shopping.com’s new feed spec here: Shopping.com Feed Spec Changes