Hello everyone! Busy, busy day here today at the CSE Management office but I just wanted to drop in quick to let you know about some comparison shopping engine news that came to my mailbox this morning.

An e-mail went out today to Become.com merchants letting them know that Become.com has increased the parameters on images that comparison shopping engine will accept.

Here is the e-mail in its entirety:

This change will allow merchants to use larger, higher quality images to help advertise their products and catch the eyes of the shoppers browsing Become.com’s comparison shopping engine.

Valued Partner,

Become.com is bringing better product images to our users and we need your help! We will now be accepting images with the following specifications:
Size: Up to 2MB
Format: JPG, PNG, GIF

We will be accepting larger image files immediately.

If you are currently submitting both small and large images, then please let your account manager know so that we can ensure we are using the correct ones.

Best,

The Become.com Team

Thats all for today folks! Hope you use the information to your benefit!

As always, if you have any questions or need any help, let me know!
CSE.Manager@gmail.com

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.

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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

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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

I received an e-mail from Smarter today letting their merchants know that there will be some scheduled downtime for maintenance. The Smarter Account Management system (SAM) will be offline from April 2nd to April 5th while they perform an upgrade.

Here is the e-mail in its entirety:

Dear Smarter.com Merchant, We are writing to inform you of a scheduled system maintenance which will affect the Smarter Account Management (SAM) system. SAM will be unavailable from 17 4/2 – 23 4/5 PDT in order to complete a system upgrade. We appreciate your understanding and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you. If you have any questions, please contact us at help_me@smarter.com. Best, The Smarter.com Team

Best Regards,

CSE.Manager@gmail.com