LoveYourFeed.com

Brian,

Great find on this story! Hadn’t seen it yet. Those are some interesting numbers in the chart. Wonder if shoppers know that the reviews are from ePinions, PriceGrabber and other syndicate partners? And are the same reviews we see on other CSE’s all the time, especially the mashups.

I blogged about the new results pages and features now on Google Product Search not too long ago, check it out if you haven’t already. You’re readers interested in this story may like it too.

http://www.ecommerceoptimization.com/articles/google-product-search-adds-price-comparisons-user-reviews-product-specifications/

Also, make sure to check out Kevin Packler’s comments over at the Mercent blog.

I was looking for some data feed tools and bumped on this blog. Thanks for sharing information. We have so much problems to feed our perfumes price comparison engine http://www.fragrantica.com/ because data feeds are really crappy. Just to name some:
Performics had detailed feed with 83 fields that our partners simply do not use.
CJ is a bit better with new API 2 and included options like manufacturer and category that also nobody use.
Merchandiser feed at linkshare is also equipped with fields that are empty!

Most other merchants that have own affiliate programs or use some less popular 3rd party affiliate solution or do not have product feed (usually offer pricegrabber file) or they do not allow deep linking to product pages via affiliate link so we had to use frame cookie + redirection and finally dropped all merchants that do not allow deep linking and do not have data feed.

We have hell of the job to filter cosmetics and tons of non-perfume products and finally we are under the heavy development of a tool that will extract some important data for perfumes also normalize, categorize it… well hope to come to live site testing this month.

For some things affiliate managers are guilty because of laziness they provide us with poorly structured data feed, but sometimes, I understand them… they simply do not have structured data from where they would fill columns in the data feed.

For example if you look at the section “Where to buy stores and prices”
http://www.fragrantica.com/perfume/Juicy-Couture/Juicy-Couture-1696.html

you will not have clear picture… but soon we plan to release our second release of price comparison engine where we will separate EDP EDT and other product types, volumes and organize it a little bit better.

You at this site are absolutely right, we should help each other and to our users by optimizing data feeds, effects will not be just in improvement in comparison engine rankings but also users will benefit too in better shopping experience.

Fragrantica.com is new comparison engine and we do not expect “big guys” to adopt themselves to our needs but we have found, within our niche, affiliate managers who helped us and they have added more data or structure it better upon our request.

This comment is not strictly about google product search and merchant reviews but I beg a pardon simply did not know where to post general comment and support your work.

Best,

Elena