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

Browsing through the wonderful internet for breaking news in the comparison shopping engine world, I stumbled upon some interesting information from ChannelAdvisor in regards to comparison shopping engine conversion rates!

From the ChannelAdvisor information sheet:

In an effort to add to the survey/industry information that is currently available, ChannelAdvisor took a sample of the most common retail categories and highlighted which shopping engines, on average, perform the best for our customers. If your program doesn’t include some of the engines listed below, this could be a lower-risk growth opportunity you should consider.

Courtesy of Channel Advisor

What makes this information so useful is that not only does it show the comparison shopping engines’ average conversion rates but they are broken down by the industry.

This information can be used as a “guide” to help you decide which comparison shopping engines you should research for your comparison shopping engine portfolio.

(I say “guide” because these figures are averages, and the industries are quite broad. This information should be used to help, but not be the only factor, in making the decision.)

That is all! I hope the weather is as gorgeous where you are as it is here! Hooray Spring!

CSE.Manager@gmail.com

Yesterday, Comparison Shopping Engine Management reported a problem with Google Base/Merchant Center. I am happy to report that this issue has been resolved. All of our client’s feeds that went out this morning were picked up and processed by Google without error.

Here is link to the help forum where Google acknowledges the problem:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/base/thread?tid=04c2d685fe982779&hl=en

In case you missed it, here is the e-mail that Google was sending out (in error) to its merchants when they submit a file on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week.

Dear Google Merchant Center user,

On March 2, 2010 11:32:44 AM PST you uploaded to Google Merchant Center via FTP a file named “FILENAME.TXT”, but you don’t have a data feed registered with this name. Please verify that you provided the correct file name, including correct capitalization.

This is a computer-generated email. Please do not reply.

You can change your notification settings at http://www.google.com/merchants/basicsettings

CSE.Manager@gmail.com