I would like to see more integration with Third Party Shopping Portals and Comparison sites as well as enhanced tools for the existing Portals.

Amazon, ebay, shopzilla, Yahoo, Google etc. all have different requirements. Making the tool more flexible based on their requirements, would be very helpful when marketing through these sites.

I know the tool cannot meet the needs of every third party site, however enhancing for the ones listed would be great.

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?

Google and Yahoo are currently in the system already, the others, yes these are things we are trying to get the API's working with our set it and forget it architecture.  We'll get you there, we promise.  We know that is a great way to drive business, as it's already worked with the ones we do support.

Let me know your ideas on the tools for the existing portals, we would love to hear them so we can make sure they are there in the future.

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Ed Sturrock
AmeriCommerce Product Manager

Not sure if this will help. I use Shopping.com and Become.com. I have submitted my product catalogs by exporting my froogle (google base) file and uploading it into become and shopping.com servers, no problems, both files were accepted.

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Best Regards,
Louis
TackleToyStore.com

That is a great way to facilitate it until we make them all 'set it and forget it' feeds.  Which feeds bring everyone the most traffic besides the ones we have implemented already, I would be curious to know.  Watch your analytics and get back to us.

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Ed Sturrock
AmeriCommerce Product Manager

I think in order to truley take advantage of these feeds, we need to be able to customize certain elements of them.

 

ie - our 100 character title is too long, feeds generally have a 50 character limit

 

We also want to be able to disallow certain products from certain feeds, especially feeds that have a cost/click 

 

Ed,

From my experiences

 Though they are not exactly Portals - Amazon and Ebay Integration would be best

 Shopping Sites (Top Sites): These 5 with Google and Yahoo make up 40% of the market

Shopping.com

Shopzilla

MSN Shopping

Nextag

PriceGrabber

Other that have shown promise:

JellyFish.com

Like.com

Become.com

ThisNext

Kaboodle

My experience has been test, test and then test more! Hope this helps!

CC

We are just about to break ground on a new service/integration for feeding to over 40 engines in our same set-it and forget-it fashion.  Keep a bead out, should be announcing in the next couple of weeks.  It will be a paid service, but the exposure is phenominal, these feeds are representing as much as 80% of some people's revenues, it's very neat to see how quickly they can take effect.  And this service is comprehensive and will be very good for our customers.

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Ed Sturrock
AmeriCommerce Product Manager

Hi Ed,

That is great, but the set it and forget it feeds don't always work.  Just like a good optimized website, the product feeds need to be individually optimized as well.  Data feed optimization is a science in itself.  Unless you have named your products properly for these and have very keyword rich descriptions, its going to be essential to optimize these feeds to get the best results.  Of course many of the feeds are pay per click, so that won't matter as much, but for something like Google's which is free, it is a must to know how to optimize for it.

I know this as I end up doing manual data feed optimization for a few of my clients.

Having said that, it's still a great feature that you guys are adding in.  Good work!

JLK

This service optimizes each feed, allows for overrides for each feed, and when combined with our upcoming custom fields option you can really get creative with the text stored and manage it right in AmeriCommerce.  As for optimization it will support everything wanted for that, however, you are right on one thing, it takes knowing about each engine to make it really shine, and that is where feed specialists come into play just like an SEO specialist.  This is a service we are looking for great partners on, so if you have experience with any please share!

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Ed Sturrock
AmeriCommerce Product Manager

Hello Ed,

As far as managing Amazon and Ebay feeds. This new service, will it also integrate sales from these channels? We were looking at integrating Order Motion with your software since you are partnered with them, but if this new system does all that, do we need to get Order Motion? 

 

Not out of the gates, the orders come into AmeriCommerce like other sales, but will be tagged with the source.  The sales channel offerings like amazon and ebay auction sales will have to be managed seperately or by import I would guess.  I dont have experience with them to say for sure though.  If the feed pushes them to your AC site, you are covered.  We do have a large customer that will be integrating into Amazon for order pulling and such right into AmeriCommerce, and they will likely be making a generic solution for this.  We will press release when that is available.

ok, is it safe to say we should wait or will Order Motion do a lot more for us.

One idea to improve the effectiveness of the current tools might be to allow a specified schedule frequency rather than a fixed daily schedule. I notice that my google feed spends most of the day being evaluated, rather than being searchable. If I was able to set the update or download frequency to 1 week rather than 1 day, my items would have twice up to the exposure time. Also, it would be less work for your server. Having a yes/no selection on the product page to allow or deny products from going to the feed would be nice as well. Some might not be good canidates for feeds. Thanks,

 

Monte