Archive for July, 2009

Amazon Product Ads Now Supports Google Base format, new Attributes

 Posted by Tien Nguyen - July 21, 2009 at 10:07 am

It wasn’t too long ago that Amazon Product Ads was a rather low-key source of traffic and sales–due in large part to their lack of FTP, but they’ve picked up much steam as of late and has the potential to become a near top tier engine solely through the amount of traffic they receive.

Recently they’ve made it easier for merchants currently on other CSE’s to submit their products onto their platform by allowing feeds in Google Base format to be submitted into their system. This helps save merchants time and effort in having to create a fresh feed specifically for Amazon.

Merchants can also take the opposite approach now and add additional columns in the feed they’re sending to Amazon:

Product Ads is now able to accept over 30 new fields in your feed.  Adding content to your product pages helps increase the visibility of your products on Amazon.com.  You can now include information like Brand, Department, Manufacturer and Manufacturer Part Number.

You can now also add multiple images, keywords, and include bullet points of important product information to build detailed product pages.

As is generally the case with product feeds, the more specific merchants can get with their the information provided in their data feed, the better and more qualified traffic they are likely to get.

Google Product Search Now Lists Product Conditions

 Posted by Tien Nguyen - July 7, 2009 at 1:14 pm

It’s been just over a month since Google started requiring a condition field within data feeds, and it looks like they’re starting to roll out this feature to certain users, as is the norm.

Consumers can now filter out just new products within their results, which can be very useful for those who consider price to be most important, as refurbished/used items will often be the lowest priced.

All in all we expect this to be good for vendors regardless if they sell new or used items, or both.

Those who sell new items will gain exposure by not having their products mixed into results of vendors selling the same items but which are refurbished.

And while those who sell refurbished items may get less traffic, consumers who use the filter probably weren’t interested in purchasing refurbished items anyway.

Most importantly though, this will increase the consumer experience of those who use Google Product Search, which should help increase user adoption rate, which ultimately will lead to more traffic and sales.

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