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.