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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.

Many of you are probably using Twitter so we’d like to share some info with you so you can make sure you’re following the right people and using the right hashtags for data feeds, shopping engines, and ecommerce.

Suggested Twitter hashtags:

#datafeedoptimization – data feed optimization
#cse – comparison shopping engine
#loveyourfeed – new!
#googlebase – Google Base/Product Search, formerly known as Froogle
#comparisonshopping – new!
#singlefeed
#ecommerce

Suggested Twitter users to follow:

@singlefeed
@loveyourfeed
@getelastic
@thefind
@bingcashback
@powerreviews
@shopcom
@googleretail
@become
@nextag
@prontodotcom
@yahooshopping
@pricegrabber

If you know any more users or tags, feel free to add them as comments!

From time to time we find merchant’s trying to include phrases that are not allowed by Google Product Search’s Content Policies. The one offense we see most often has to do with merchants trying to include “Free Shipping” or similar phrases in their product titles, descriptions, or custom attribute fields. Google’s Policies state “Do not include promotional or boilerplate text in your product data feed. All text should directly describe the product you are submitting. Text relating to shipping or store policies should not be included.” which is somewhat difficult to interpret. Merchants are only trying to include valid product information to please the shopper. We recommend that you avoid using the following in your feed’s titles and descriptions:

• Free Shipping, Free Gift, or other word with “Free” attached, 100% Satisfaction, 30 Day Money Back, Guarantee, etc.
• Excessive capitalization of words, unless it is proper brand spelling. Example – LEGO Building Blocks is correct, but KELLOG EGGO WAFFLES is not.
• Excessive punctuation characters or exclamation points and random symbols.
• Gimmicky words and superlatives such as  Best, Greatest, #1, or other subjective claims.
• Repetition of words

So be careful with the words being included in your products on Google Product Search or your products may be removed for violation of these guidelines.

If you’re a reader of the blog, you probably noticed that we were WAY past due for a new look. As we’ve started to post more regularly here, we decided that we needed to fix things up. We rolled out some fresh paint with a new theme, upgraded to the most recent release of WordPress, and added some new widgets. If you find anything that is broken please let us know!