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).