On Thursday April 22nd the comparison shopping engine Shopping.com announced that it will be making some changes to their feed specifications. Merchants who submit their products to Shopping.com will need to update their data feed to meet the new requirements by July 1st, 2010. If you do not update your data feed to meet the new requirements, your data feed could be rejected.
Here is the e-mail that went out to merchants yesterday.
Effective July 1, 2010 Shopping.com will be implementing our new listing policy. It is important to review the new feed specifications and to apply by July 1, 2010 so products are not rejected.
In our effort to offer a better experience for our shoppers and our merchants alike we have found that every attribute you provide enables us to drive higher qualified leads. Richer data feed content will help drive up your conversion to sale.
Act Now to avoid any sale lost post July 1, 2010!!
For additional information please reference our latest blog or view our complete feed specifications.
Regards,
Shopping.com Client Services
Currently, Shopping.com‘s data feed specifications only lists these fields as required attributes:
ISBN*
Product Name
Product URL
Product Price*For Media Only
However on July 1st 2010, the data feed specifications will increase the number of required attributes to:
Unique Merchant SKU
MPN**/ISBN*
UPC**/EAN**
Product Name
Product URL
Price
Product Description
Image URL
Condition*For Media Only
**For Computers & Electronics Only
You can download the current and new feed specifications for Shopping.com by clicking here
If you are already submitting these attributes in your data feed, hats off to you! As you know, these attributes are very important fields to include when submitting to ANY comparison shopping engine. The more information you can provide about any product, the more likely you are to appear in search results!
Most comparison shopping engines display search results using a mix of bidding and search relevancy. The math behind it is simple, the more applicable information you submit for each product, the more relevant your listing become to what shoppers are searching to find that product.
If you are currently not submitting these attributes in your data feeds then you are only hurting yourself and your own bottom line. You should get to work on including these fields in all data feeds to all comparison shopping engines immediately.
As always, if you have any questions or need some help let me know!
Have a great weekend!
CSE.Manager@gmail.com
