If you’re a merchant tired of having to redo your feed for each individual engine, then Google has made your life just a tad easier, by allowing you to upload either your Shopping.com or Shopzilla feeds to their system.

From their blog:

We understand it can be time-consuming for merchants to prepare their product feeds for multiple shopping engines, each with their own formats and standards. That’s why we’re introducing a new uploading option that enables merchants to submit information to Google Product Search using existing data feeds they’ve prepared for other shopping engines.

Right now it appears to accept feeds that are in Shopzilla and Shopping.com formats, as seen below, but may be expanding in the future.

This is a good solution if you’re short-handed in time or manpower and just want to submit to Google Product Search in a painfree manner, but since ideally you want to submit a specific, optimized feed to Google in order to give your products as high a ranking as possible.

We’re certainly not ones to judge others on how they spend their money, as we’ve all made our handful of questionable purchases at some point in time.

However once in a while we come across certain products that definitely catch our attention–in particular when searching through Shopping.com for “handbag“, as seen below.

While it’s debatable whether or not a $2,000 handbag can be defined as an outrageous purchase, I think most will agree that a pair of slippers, regardless if they were licensed and/or worn by Betty Boop herself, is not exactly a bargain at $50,000.

To those shoppers who thought they were in for a good deal though, imagine the reaction they had when they clicked through to the actual merchant’s site and saw that the slippers were just $5–effectively a  $49,995 discount.

These are the mistakes that too many merchants out there are making with their feeds, that is to say, showing up in irrelevant searches and listing incorrect prices.

Incidentally, an actual search for Betty Boop Slipper doesn’t yield this particular merchant at all.

Betty Boop herself would not approve.

One of the main methods of keeping overall costs low on the shopping engines (while facing minimal sacrifices in revenue) is to ensure that clicks that go through to your site remain as relevant as possible.

In order to achieve this, detailed product titles and descriptions that describe exactly what it is a merchant is selling are important; compared to broad, generic phrases that will list your product on search result pages via phrases that are irrelevant to your products–thereby driving unqualified traffic to your site resulting in higher costs.

One way that Shopping.com is trying to combat this is by introducing more columns to their feed that a merchant can use in order to better target their audiences.

In anticipation of the 2008 holiday season, Shopping.com is redesigning how we display all shoes on our main site with a focus on improving product presentation, description and conversion to sale.

Through the use of user testing groups of real shoppers, we have identified FOUR key attributes in the shoes and clothing categories which help shoppers make decisions more quickly:

•    Gender
•    Type
•    Color
•    Size

Though these attributes won’t be required in your data feed, you can be sure that your competition is going to fully utilize these, thereby giving them an advantage in that space.

How to use these new attributes

For certain merchants these fields may be easy to fill depending on how many SKUs they have or how their feed exporting system is set up.

On the other hand for larger merchants who don’t have the tools to utilize these new attributes, there’s no need to panic as this is essentially a bonus feature for merchants with the capabilities to do so, and you’ll unlikely experience much drop off in traffic or sales as a result.

In fact, with Q4 coming up, most merchants should anticipate a spike in both traffic and revenue, as more and more shoppers are going to want to experience the season of giving from the comfort of their homes rather than head to the battlefields we refer to as the mall.

Plus, with the economy being in worse shape than we’ve seen in some years pass, shoppers are going to be more motivated to find lower prices online via the comparison shopping engines, making the planning of next few months vitally important to your company (we’ll explore what Q4 means and how to take advantage in a later blog post).

As such, you might want to consider outsourcing your shopping engine management to companies that will help maximize your revenue and efficiency.

Just a suggestion

We’ve previously discussed the importance of feedback on the engines and how it can help your overall bottom line.

However we’ve received questions from some merchants as to why customer feedback wasn’t showing up on their NexTag accounts, and the answer was simple: NexTag has a policy in which a merchant has to be listed for at least 45 days before feedback is reflected under the account.

If you’ve just signed up for NexTag then and are wondering why there’s no feedback on there–give it some time and it shall appear.

It’s that time again, earnings season, where the huge net players not only post their financial results for the current quarter but forecast their outlook for the rest of the year. As the second quarter comes to a close and it grows more apparent that runaway energy costs and decreased confidence in financial institutions has taken a toll on economic growth, many pundits have wondered if the growth of e-commerce would be slowed or reversed by the greater economic landscape. Over the next two weeks I’ll take a look at the four companies, Google, eBay, Overstock, and Amazon to help us gauge where e-commerce is going in the next six to twelve months.

Today’s Spotlight:

Overstock.com announced earnings on Friday, July 18th, reporting losses of 6.5 million dollars on 188.8 million dollars in revenue (+27 percent YoY). Similar to eBay, Overtstock share price dropped dramatically after the announcement (- 15 percent the next trading day) depsite meeting analyst’s expectations for earnings. During the earnings call CEO Patrick Byrne reiterated confidence in the company’s ability to  deliver positive earnings by the end of the year.

CPC’s Thoughts- We shouldn’t read too much into Overstock’s earnings loss for two reasons. First, Overstock has not earned a positive profit since it went public. Second, Overstock’s marketing expenese (probably in the form of PPC since their TV exposure has definitely decreased in the past year) increased significantly during second quarter (+79% YoY or $14.2 million). With that said Overstock.com’s marketing focus on soft goods geared toward the 30-45 female demographic and limited brand cachet allows it to be a good barometer for the overall health of e-commerce as it relates to non-electronics merchants. While the current quarter shows positive signs it should be interesting to see if management can actually deliver on their promises of continued earnings/revenue growth in Q3 and Q4.

While the comparison shopping industry as a whole still retains the main underlying concepts that have made them so popular over the years (after all, why fix something that’s not broken?), merchants will be glad to know that their hard-earned money is going toward constant tweaking done to keep things fresh.

In particular, over the past few weeks we’ve noticed a handful of tweaks among the engines that add to the buying experience without detracting from it at all.

Below we’ll give you a quick rundown of some recent changes that we’ve noticed, and we’ll be sure to keep you updated on future modifications a well:

Pricegrabber has added a Woot-like element to their site (Woot’s motto is “One Day, One Deal”), and feature a section called the Product of the Day which, like Woot, offers a daily, miscellaneous item at a discounted price. How discounted it actually can vary, depending on the day/product.

They’ve also redesigned their search results pages, giving them a more modern web 2.0-ish update, complete with bigger buttons, bigger text, and a more colorful design.

(The first image is the current, newer design, and the one below represents the older design)

Frequent viewers of any news/sports network, e.g. ESPN/CNN, will be familiar with Shopzilla’s latest design change–a product ticker at the top of the page which keeps track of recent transactions made on their site, which a customer can click through and view on their own.

And finally not to be outdone, Google itself has also quietly made a fairly significant change behind the scenes within their login pages, labeled “Performance”.

From here merchants who are on Google Base can finally track how many clicks their products are getting on base-which as we’ve discussed in the past has been a rather confusing issue.

Up until now they’ve been the only major shopping comparison tool that brings in significant traffic to (automatically) lack this feature.

The reasoning being of course, the other engines (i.e. the ones you have to pay to use) have to keep track of how many clicks you get in order to determine how much to change you-you get what you pay for though right?

Speaking of Google then, our good friend Tom the Developer has also made some nifty visual and practical changes to his amazing tool as well:

If you’re a Google Base user looking to improve your results and rankings, his tool provides a great method which details what your competitors are listing and not listng–and best of all, like Google Base, his tool is free for all to use.

It’s that time again, earnings season, where the huge net players not only post their financial results for the current quarter but forecast their outlook for the rest of the year. As the second quarter comes to a close and it grows more apparent that runaway energy costs and decreased confidence in financial institutions has taken a toll on economic growth, many pundits have wondered if the growth of e-commerce would be slowed or reversed by the greater economic landscape. Over the next two weeks I’ll take a look at the four companies, Google, eBay, Overstock, and Amazon to help us gauge where e-commerce is going in the next six to twelve months.

Today’s Spotlight:

eBay announced earnings on Wednesday, July 16th, reporting profits of 460 million (+25 percent YoY) on 2.2 billion dollars in revenue (+20 percent YoY). eBay stock dropped rather dramatically after the earnings announcement (-14 percent the next trading day) despite beating the street’s expectations for both revenue and earnings per share due poor marketplace health metrics. eBay Core (eBay.com) revenue only grew at 13 percent during the current quarter while GMV (Gross Merchandise Value- The total dollar amount of transactions on eBay’s platform) grew at an anemic 8 percent.

CPC’s Thoughts- During eBay’s Q1 earning call, new CEO John Donahoe announced that eBay would be making significant changes to its marketplace to retain and attract buyers and sellers to the site. A number of changes were introduced to the site aimed at increasing inventory and streamlining seller feedback to help to kick start slowing GMV. Despite this, GMV grew in the single digits with overall revenue only buoyed by eBay’s growing Advertising business (Through partnerships with Yahoo and Google). It remains to be seen if the changes made in the first half of the year will have a positive impact on GMV growth during the second half of the year. While the earnings numbers and analyst downgrades are concerning, due to the marketplace changes eBay performance during Q2 should not be used as a yardstick to gauge the health of overall health e-commerce. It should be interesting however to see if merchants impacted by eBay slowing growth and rapid changes will migrate over to the other marketplaces (Amazon, Buy.com, Overstock) or invest in their own brands to compete on the shopping engines.

They say that there are three certainties in life–death, taxes, and CPC Strategy’s high level of management services.

And it would be a vast understatement to say that the services that our clients have come to expect since our inception would not be possible without a special partner of ours:

Co-founder Chip Arndt and his team at MerchantAdvantage provide an exceptional service that takes the guess work out of comparison shopping, and makes dealing with data feeds much more manageable than it has any right to be. For merchants of all sizes that want to get listed on the shopping engines, Chip’s company offers a tremendous solution for those brave souls willing to tackle the engines on their own.

And for online merchants who are still debating whether or not to listed on the engines, Chip’s latest blog entry may be the tipping point for those who are currently on the fence, as he offers several good reasons to get listed, as well as many great tips on how to prepare your site for such a move:

Clean up your online storefront/website.  Ask your friends to go to your website and ask them this: “If you were a stranger and you came to my website would you buy from me?” If they say no, ask them why and remember that you only have one chance to make a good first impression.

It’s a great read for not only those merchants who aren’t yet on the engines, but it also is a great resource for those already listed wanting more from their campaigns.