Shopping.com

Shopping.com Experiencing Product Issues

 Posted by Tien - July 28, 2010 at 11:46 am

Shopping.com is currently experiencing issues with products being listed as rejected or mis-categorized in their user interface.

The main issue is that many products that were previously categorized correctly are now being put in their miscellaneous section, thereby not allowing consumers who browse through categories to find certain products, though they should still show up in searches.

The slight benefit here is that products listed in the miscellaneous categories have the lowest CPC’s, at $0.10-$0.30 depending on price, but again minimizes their exposure.

They’ve notified us that their engineering and product teams are working to resolve the issue, though no exact timeline has been given.

If you’re a CPC Strategy client we’re working to ensure all of your products are being processed and categorized correctly. If you’re a merchant experiencing these problems with your account click on the Help tab at the top right hand corner of your account and then go to the Contact Us tab at the top right hand corner of that page.

We recommend submitting a ticket through the Online Support Form for the fastest results.

Shopping.com Offering Personalized Feed Optimization

 Posted by Tien - June 25, 2010 at 9:50 am

Merchants listed on Shopping.com have been receiving notifications on what their feed may be missing in preparation for their new feed requirements starting on July 1st. Those who fail to meet these new requirements risk being having their products delisted from Shopping.com

Now, expanding on just getting the minimum required to get listed, Shopping.com is going to begin offering merchants reports on how to optimize their feeds to ensure they’re getting the highest quality traffic possible.

However, it should be noted that since these are all computer generated, rather than human-reviewed, that the information can be misleading and feeds that are in fact fully optimized can be flagged with warnings that are out of a merchant’s hands.

A sample report can be seen below:

More information can be gleaned here.

Shopping.com to Undergo Maintenance May 21st

 Posted by Tien - May 18, 2010 at 10:47 am

A heads up to any merchants listing on Shopping.com:

Shopping.com will be performing system maintenance to the merchant facing tools starting Thursday, May 21 2010 at midnight EST and will last up to 24 hours. This will be an extended downtime that will impact your ability to make changes to your Shopping.com campaign on Friday.

The following systems will be unavailable during the maintenance.

• Merchant Account Center

• FTP & Feed Processing

• Reporting / Bidding / Billing

Please post your freshest feed by 12pm on Thursday May 20th. This will ensure that your updates are applied and your feed is fully processed for Friday.

Their message is a tad confusing since May 21 marks the start of Friday and not Thursday–and for those who are real nitpickers midnight does not fall technically fall into any one day.

But in essence, any work done behind the scenes of Shopping.com, including FTP uploads, viewing click/cost/revenue totals, bidding, etc. will be unavailable Thursday night/early Friday morning for up to 24 hours.

That being the case, Shopping.com recommends merchants update their latest feed 12 hours prior to the scheduled maintenance in order to ensure that Shopping.com will process it in time, as any changes made during the maintenance period will not be possible.

For the full message and important FTP changes, click here.

Shopping.com Updates Required Fields for Merchants

 Posted by Tien - April 28, 2010 at 11:14 am

Starting July 1st, Shopping.com will expand their list of required fields to 9, up from the three that they have now:

Generally merchants across all shopping engines should have these 9 populated already, so it shouldn’t affect too merchants who currently are on Shopping.com–but certainly it is worth one’s effort to verify that everything is put into place.

Merchants who sell apparel should also be cognizant of additional custom attributes that they can be including within their feed as well.

Shopping.com Introduces Product Reviews for its Retailers

 Posted by Nii Ahene - February 23, 2010 at 5:05 pm

Shopping.com has launched a new product review widget that allows customers to write reviews for products they’ve used in the past. These customer based reviews will be displayed both on merchant websites and next to product listings on Shopping.com.

Retailers can choose to install the widget on any or all of their product pages, giving them the power to highlight customer reviews for particular hot product offerings.

As part of the widget launch, Shopping.com is offering merchants the new feature for six months for free to merchants who sign up before March 31st. It should be interesting to see the impact the widget has on both Shopping.com clickthrough rates and conversions for participating retailers.

If you’d like to read more about Shopping.com’s Product Reviews or you want to see a sample website with the product reviews installed, check out Shopping.com guide located at http://merchantsupport.shopping.com/useful_guides.

Shopping.com Announces Rate Changes, Effective March 12

 Posted by Tien Nguyen - February 12, 2010 at 11:46 am

Not to be outdone by Smarter.com’s rate changes Shopping.com has announced their own rate changes of their own.

After introducing their price dependent CPC rates last year in which their rates are determined by both category as well price, they’ve announced some changes that by March 12 will take effect.

Below are the categories that will be affected:

These changes are not quite as drastic as the ones made by Smarter, and include reduced CPC rates within certain categories as well.

It’ll be interesting to see the effect this will have on our merchants’ campaigns, as well as what the other shopping engines are going to do about their rates.

Listing Promotional Messages on the CSEs

 Posted by Tien Nguyen - November 4, 2009 at 3:58 pm

One of the unique aspects of CSE management is figuring out how all the shopping engines’ unique features differentiate themselves from each other.

While columns such as product URLs, product names, descriptions, etc. are generally universal among them all, there are many discrepancies among them that a merchant should know about in order to maximize their listings on the engines.

Below we provide details on practices that will help best promote your products specifically for each engine:

Listing Nextag Sales Price:

- Include MSRP or regular price in feed

Nextag Free Shipping:

- If everything has free shipping, select “Always Free for All Items” in the “Manage Shipping Rules” section
- Otherwise include shipping costs in feed

Nextag Promotional Message:

- For a single message, bid at least $0.05 on the “Message” under “Manage Bids by Category”, then click “Set Marketing Message” and choose from the available templates
- To select different marketing messages by product, include a “Marketing Message” column in the feed and be sure to bid at least $0.05 on the “Message” for all products under “Manage Bids by Category”

Listing Free Shipping:

- Set column “Shipping Rate” to 0 in feed

Shopping.com Promotional Message:

- Include message in “Stock Description” column in feed.
- Free
- 100 character limit

Shopzilla Free Shipping:

- If shipping is free for all products, select “Free shipping for all products” under shipping information.
- If not, set rules through feed, column: “Shipping Cost”

Shopzilla Sales Price:

- Include “Original Price” & “Sale Price” columns in feed
- Be sure to select Contact Us in your Shopzilla login and notify your account manager that you’re adding a column; your listings will temporarily come down while they re-process your feed.

Shopzilla Coupon:

- Go to “Manage Listings”
- “Special Offers”
- Select from the available options

PriceGrabber Free Shipping:


- Set it under the column “shipping costs” within the feed
- In the login under “Your Account” it can be modified in “Shipping and Tax Info” (not available for all accounts)

PriceGrabber Coupon:

- All the info can be included in the feed using their coupon spec sheet.

Google Products Search Tax and Shipping:

-Add a column called “tax” in the format–Country:State:Percent: y/n shipping

So for example if a merchant is based in the United States, California, charges 8% tax, and offers free shipping, that column would read– US:CA:8:y

More info can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=160162

Become Promotional Message:

- Include desired text in feed
- Bid on desired categories in “Bids” tab

Become Sales Price:

- Include the following columns: “MSRP” and “Price”

Smarter Promotional Message:

- Have the two columns: “Regular Price” and “Sale Price”
- Go to “Extras” tab
- Select “Submit Coupons” and fill in appropriate fields

Yahoo Shopping Sales Price:

- Have the two columns: “price” and “sale-price”

Yahoo Shopping Free Shipping:

- Fill in the appropriate SKU with “0” in the column “shipping-price”

Pronto Sales Price:

- Include the columns: “Retail Price” and “Price”

Shopping.com Announces Rate Increases for Q4

 Posted by Tien Nguyen - October 16, 2009 at 10:45 am

We officially declared the launch of the Q4 shopping season with Yahoo’s announcement that they’re increasing their CPC Rates for Q4.

Shopping.com has followed suit by announcing their own rates increase–however like last year they’re not doing it across the board like other engines traditionally do.

Instead, rates for 85% of their categories will remain the same, and the only increases will come in categories that they consider maximize sale and qualified leads:

With the holiday season approaching, Shopping.com anticipates a significant increase in traffic and holiday sales. Based on the performance of the last few years, we drove an average increase of 35% in qualified leads during the peak shopping season.

We are pleased to announce this year’s holiday pricing solution continues to challenge the industry standard of ‘across the board rate increases’. Our pricing is only changing in categories where conversion to sale and qualified leads are maximized during the holiday season. In fact, 85% of the Shopping.com categories will remain flat (no CPC rate increase).

The holiday pricing promotion is effective November 15, 2009 through December 31, 2009. During this time Shopping.com will automatically adjust your CPC bids during the pricing promotion period therefore you will not need to make changes to your account.

It’s a bold move that we’re certainly in favor of, but like last year we certainly don’t expect the other engines to make similar moves–instead we expect rates to increase for all the engines across all their categories.

For the complete list of categories that this change will affect click here.

Sample Data Feeds and Feed Specifications for Comparison Shopping Engines

 Posted by Nii Ahene - October 7, 2009 at 10:21 am

Below you’ll find both sample data feeds and links to data feed specifications for the major shopping engines (As of 10/3/2009). It’s highly recommended that you read over the latest specification at the engine resource site before deploying the feeds for your campaigns.
-Nii

Google Base/Google Product Search
- Sample Data Feed for Google Base/Google Product Search
- Google Base/Google Product Search Data Feed Specifications Page

Shopzilla
- Sample Data Feed for Shopzilla
- Shopzilla Data feed Specifications Page

Pricegrabber
- Sample Data Feed for Pricegrabber
- Pricegrabber Data feed Specifications Page

Nextag
- Sample Data Feed for Nextag
- Nextag Data feed Specifications Page

Shopping.com
- Sample Data File for Shopping.com – Varies By Category, see Specification Page
- Shopping.com Data Feed Specifications Page

Bing Shopping
- Sample Data Feed for Bing Cashback
- Bing Cashback Data Feed Spcifications Page

Yahoo Shopping
- Sample Data Feed for Yahoo Shopping
- Yahoo Shopping Data Feed Specification Page (Must be a Yahoo Shopping Merchant to View)

Become
- Sample Data Feed for Become.com
- Become Data feed Specifications Page

Smarter.com
- Sample Data Feed for Smarter
- Smarter Data feed Specifications Page

Pronto
- Sample Data Feed for Pronto
- Pronto Data Feed Specifications Page

Amazon Product Ads
- Sample Data Feed for Amazon Product Ads
- Amazon Product Ads Data Feed Specifications Page (Need to have an Amazon Product Ads account to View)

Shopping.com Gives Merchants 80 More Days to Link to Paypal

 Posted by Tien Nguyen - October 1, 2009 at 10:28 am

A few months ago Shopping.com announced that they’ll start charging merchants via Paypal, and said that the switch-over would be made by September 10th.

After the 10th passed they gave a pre-ultimatum ultimatum that all accounts would *need* to be changed by September 30th (yesterday).

And now for merchants who still haven’t gotten the memo, Shopping.com has this notice of a final ultimatum that in 80 days, or December 21, their listings will be removed from Shopping.com altogether.

Good to see that Shopping.com is procrastinator-friendly.