On Tuesday July 20th 2010 Bing Cashback e-mailed its clients to let them know that the Cashback program was indeed ending on July 30th 2010 and that the comparison shopping engine will be switching to a COST FREE model and will be called simple Bing Shopping! More information can be viewed on the Bing Shopping page

I am sure I do not need to sit here and tell you how awesome this change will be. Finally another proficient free comparison shopping engine! Merchant’s will now have two strong free marketing channels for their products.

In a time where making every dollar count is more vital than it has ever been, finally some good news!

Here is a copy of the email that went out to merchants:

Dear Merchant,

As we recently announced, the Bing cashback program is retiring on July 30, 2010. This email serves as notice that your cashback merchant agreement for Bing cashback Search and/or Bing cashback Shopping terminates July 30, 2010, at midnight Eastern Time.

We want to introduce you to our new, free Bing Shopping program, but first we’d like to review the steps you should take to prepare for the discontinuation of Bing cashback.

Take action by the end of July

To avoid customer confusion, you should remove references to the cashback program from your ad copy and all pages of your website by end of day July 30. Remember to:

• Remove the cashback logo and other cashback graphics or references from all pages of your website.
• Remove links to cashback terms and conditions.
• Unwrap your cashback URLs from your ads in adCenter.
• Remove cashback from your ad copy from your ads in adCenter.

You should also remove the cashback pixel-tracking code from your website on July 31. Doing so before July 31 might cause issues for your customers. For merchants who submit a batch file, the transmission of batch-file transactions should stop by August 3, 2010 and the last submission should contain transactions with a purchase date of no later than July 30th. You will still be able to submit returns or cancelations via a batch feed or through the Merchant Center through end of day September 29, 2010.

New Bing Shopping program

As the cashback program retires, we are happy to invite you to be a part of a select group of merchants who can list their product catalogs on Bing for free starting on July 31, 2010*. This program lets you offer a broader set of products with little to no extra work required!

To get started, all you have to do is continue to send us your Bing cashback Shopping data feed after July 30, 2010. Starting July 31, if you continue to send your cashback feed to us it will be governed by the Bing Merchant Data Feed Terms of Use. For broader coverage on Bing, we encourage you to include in your feed all of your eligible products consistent with our Bing Merchant Data Feed Terms of Use.

How to learn more

For more information, visit the Bing Shopping page or contact the Bing Shopping team at freeshop@microsoft.com. In addition to our new free Bing Shopping program, we’re continually improving the Bing Shopping experience to help shoppers discover products and compare offers. You can sign in to our Merchant Center to update your contact information and ensure that you continue to get the latest news about Bing Shopping.

If you need help preparing your account for the discontinuation of Bing cashback, please visit our Frequently Asked Questions page or contact cashback help at cshbkhlp@microsoft.com.

Thank you for your past participation in Bing cashback. We look forward to helping you succeed with the Bing Shopping program.

Sincerely,

The Microsoft Advertising Bing cashback team

CSE.Manager@gmail.com

On Tuesday July 13th 2010 Google Product Search sent out an e-mail to their merchants letting them know that as of August 2010 merchant who submit products in the electronics, books or media categories will need to include applicable manufacturers part numbers (MPN), brand names, universal product codes (UPC) and international standard book number (ISBN) in their data feed. These fields will NOT be required but as they say “to avoid seeing a drop in traffic from Product Search, we urge you to start including these unique identifiers as soon as possible”

As I have said all along, the more information that you include with your listings, the more relevant they will be and the higher they will list within the search results. If you are an electronics merchant currently submitting to Google Product Search, you better be submitting those fields anyway! If you are not, you should head back to comparison shopping engine marketing class 101.

I have posted the whole e-mail below in case you missed it. As always have a great day and if you need help with anything, don’t hesitate to drop us a line.

CSE.Manager@gmail.com

Hello,

Starting in late August 2010, we are making some changes to how your products in the Electronics, Books, and Media categories may appear on Google Product Search. In order to provide as much information as possible to our users, we need your help in matching your products to our “product pages” where users are able to view useful data such as product specifications or reviews. If you are submitting products in the above categories for the US version of Google Product Search, please start including unique product identifiers, such as MPN, Brand, UPC or ISBN. We will make similar changes to Product Search in the UK and Germany at a later date.

These attributes will not be required for your feed to process correctly, however, to avoid seeing a drop in traffic from Product Search, we urge you to start including these unique identifiers as soon as possible. You can find unique product identifier information on Product Search product pages, under the “technical specifications” section for Electronics items, the “Tracks” or “Details” section for Media, and the “Overview” section for books.

For more details, including what specific identifiers you should include for each category of item, please see our Help Center at http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?answer=160161

Sincerely,

The Google Product Search Team

Email preferences: You have received this email service announcement to update you about important changes to your Google Merchant Center account. Please do not reply to this email directly. If you have any questions, please contact us from our Help Center at http://www.google.com/support/merchants

Copyright 2010. Google Inc, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043.

Lately, there has been a lot of speculation and out right fear of duplicate content penalties on your organic rankings if a comparison shopping engine is also displaying your content. The idea behind this is that if Google sees your content on let say thefind.com (which has been getting the most heat for this as it has started to surpass the actual merchant site in the search results) will they penalize your actual website and cause you to down rank.

I started searching for answers on this after reading a post on the Y Store Forums. It was not long after that when I found a post from the guys over at Solid Cactus on the FeedPerfect Blog. The blog post references a discussion with thefind.com themselves and goes on to explain in detail what is actually happening (that the merchants are being penalized, but due to the changes to the search algorithm that Google has made, thefind.com and other sites are ranking higher because they are being deemed “more credible sources “).

The post is a good read and I suggest it to anyone out there who has been “terrorized” by this duplicate content rumor.

http://blog.feedperfect.com/2010/07/does-the-find-create-duplicate-content-issues-for-merchants-in-organic-search-engines/

Hope everyone had a good holiday weekend…

…now get back to work!

CSE.Manager@gmail.com