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.