While a good majority of Americans resolute to lose some extra weight during the new year, a couple of shopping engines have recently been packing on a little some extra.

A few months ago Shopping.com began allowing merchants to submit new header columns into their feeds, which we thought was a great way to allow customers to narrow down what they’re looking for–and it appears they’re beginning to take advantage of this feature.

Currently the feature appears to only be available for shoe shoppers, as users browsing for shoes can now sort through popular brands by size as well as color. This is similar to Like.com’s interface except Like uses a proprietary system that uses image recognition for sorting, whereas Shopping.com relies on the attributes that merchants send them.

This is a great addition for both consumers as it provides a better overall shopping experience in looking for exactly what they want, as well as for merchants to be more specific about their offerings.

Also revamping their look is Smarter.com. They have a much sleeker design with bigger fonts and a neat widget on their front page that rotates images of some of their more popular items around.

They also appear to be further jumping on the social media wagon by promoting their blog on their front page, which doesn’t only discuss the retail industry, but operates more like a magazine column–which provides plenty of incentive for users to want to come back to their site.

Imagine that, operating a blog to promote your business, what else will they think of

Smack Shopping, which is a part of Jellyfish, which ended up being scooped up by Microsoft, is sadly shutting its doors down as of February 16. As reported by TechCrunch, we would agree that it’s a surprising move for several reasons:
a) it’s backed by Microsoft, a company certainly not short on funds by any means
b) in the downtrodden economy where consumers are constantly looking for cheap deals one would think sites like these would gain in popularity
c) Microsoft has continuously tried to break into social media–e.g. its investment in Facebook–which Smack Shopping was relatively successful at doing.They even have a Facebook fan page.

Perhaps they’re simply narrowing their focus onto its Cashback platform, which to the surprise of quite a few, has been successful for merchants who list their products on there via a cost per acquisition model.

In any case, many frugal shoppers (not to be confused with Froogle) will miss the Smack Shopping model, and hopefully similar sites such as a Woot do not follow suit any time soon.

Become.com has recently come out with an announcement that they’re offering “Free” logo listings for merchants on their site:

We will be instituting a new policy effective immediately offering logo placement on PSERPs and merchant tables as a premier feature, available only to merchants bidding $0.10 above category minimums.

The caveat here is that it is only going to be “free” for merchants bidding at least $0.10 per click over the category minimum–or basically what it costs to list a logo in the first place.

And while there are certainly instances where bidding can be useful, e.g. a newer client on the engines that’s not getting much traffic and whose primary goal is product exposure–we at CPC Strategy tend to shy most of our clients away from bidding, as it can be a quick way to see your spend on the shopping engines skyrocket.

Also, in light of the state of the retail space, unless of course your name is Amazon, we’re definitely fans of anything the engines do that benefit the merchants, particularly if it’s “free.”

However as we like to warn our clients though, bidder beware.

As stated over at CSE Strategies, as predicted Shopping.com is raising the CPC rates for most of their categories in anticipation for Q4–however they are also unprecedentedly lowering their rates for certain categories for Q4.

Generally most merchants/online retailers don’t mind the increase since the shopping season offsets the cost increase with a generous increase in revenue as well, so you can imagine the delight of many merchants with the announcement with the combination of potentially lower costs and higher revenues.

As speculated by CSE Strategies, the state of the economy and low consumer confidence may have a lot to do with this decision, as Shopping.com may be predicting a slower shopping season than normal, and don’t want to force its merchants to pay the price–literally.

How big of a difference is this willing to make?

Probably nothing too significant, as just 14% of SDC’s categories have been reduced, but for those who sell primarily in those categories and who were anticipating a cost increase it should definitely be welcome news given everything else that’s gone on.

What will be particularly interesting is to see how other engines react to this news, whether it be the major ones or the 2nd tier ones, hopefully others will follow suit making Shopping.com a trend-setter, rather than a dissenter.

The infamous Y2K or “millennium” bug that was once promised by some cynics to set off a chain reaction that would lead to the end of the world was due in large part to early stage computer programmers’ inability to foresee their future generations’ need to go past the year “99″.

And while a similar lack of foresight in Google Base’s login interface is generally not associated with any sort of doomsday predictions (that we’ve heard of at least)–it can often lead to some needless confusion for certain merchants who list high quantities of items.

We are often asked by clients why Google is only “accepting” a certain portion of their items. This is the result of Google limiting the “Active Items” variable to just 9,999 (see below)

Before you go off and rush to your nearest bomb shelter though, keep in mind that this is simply a glitch on Google’s part–who for some reason do not have the technical capabilities to enable 5 digits on this tab–and has no bearing whatsoever to the actual number of products that you can have listed.

So if you are a merchant listing more than 9,999 products, pay attention instead to the “Processed” and “Inserted” variables listed under “Item Status”–as seen above. This is a more accurate number that reflects the true number of items that were accepted, and will come up on Google Base and Google Product searches.

As a final addendum then while you slowly take off those tin foil hats: if you want a preview of how your products are appearing to Google Base users, you can click on the “Active Items” tab and select the “View all searchable items” option (as seen below:)

We recommend this step to all merchants listing on Google Base (and there’s no reason not to be) to ensure that all their images/titles/descriptions/prices show up properly.

And if they aren’t, then it would be a good time to blame Y2K…

Until next time then, we’ll see you on the shopping engines.

-Tien