Data Feeds

[dferguson]

ezimerchant Professional V4.0 introduces a new and very powerful marketing feature called Data Feeds.

There are now many websites known as 'Shopping Comparison Engines' or 'Shopping Comparison Web Sites'.

Some examples:

www.shopping.com (http://www.shopping.com)
www.shopbot.com.au (http://www.shopbot.com.au/)
www.myshopping.com.au (http://www.myshopping.com.au)
www.shopzilla.com (http://www.shopzilla.com/) - USD sites only

These websites allow potential shoppers to search for a particular product and then compare the price between many different online stores.

Shopping comparison sites are a great way for shoppers to find what they want, at a good price.

These sites are now able to deliver substantial amounts of traffic to your online store if you can get listed in their database - and this is where the 'Data Feeds' comes in.

Shopping Comparison web sites require special data feeds which allows the shopping comparison web site to catalogue your entire shop in its own database.

The only way to get listed in the comparison engine is to feed it your data via a 'Data Feed'

ezimerchant Professional V4.0 can now generate several different data feeds for various popular shopping comparison websites.

Current Supported Feeds:

Comparison Engines:
http://forums.ezimerchant.com/forumcontentimages/v4area/datafeeds/marketing_shoppingcom.png (http://www.shopping.com/) http://forums.ezimerchant.com/forumcontentimages/v4area/datafeeds/marketing_getprice.png (http://www.getprice.com.au/) http://forums.ezimerchant.com/forumcontentimages/v4area/datafeeds/marketing_shopbot.png (http://www.getprice.com.au/) http://forums.ezimerchant.com/forumcontentimages/v4area/datafeeds/marketing_shopzilla.png (http://www.shopzilla.com/) http://forums.ezimerchant.com/forumcontentimages/v4area/datafeeds/marketing_myshoppingcomau.png (http://www.myshopping.com.au/) http://forums.ezimerchant.com/forumcontentimages/v4area/datafeeds/marketing_buythis.png (http://www.buythis.com.au/)

Affiliate Marketing/SiteMap type Data Feeds:
http://forums.ezimerchant.com/forumcontentimages/v4area/datafeeds/marketing_google.png (http://www.google.com.au/) http://forums.ezimerchant.com/forumcontentimages/v4area/datafeeds/marketing_clixgalore.png (http://www.clixgalore.com.au/)

Using the Data Feeds:

To enable a datafeed, go into the 'Premium Features' section of ezimerchant and click on the enable button next to the data feed you wish to enable. You will be asked to confirm your acceptance to the additional monthly fees and then the GTS server will be updated.

Once your data feed is activated it will be automatically generated whenever you generate your web site.

Please see the individual Feed Descriptions and Notes for more detailed information about using each of the data feeds.

Which feeds should I use?


Quite often I get asked which feeds should be used and why. I will give my personal reccommendations below.

For Australian Merchants: (In order)

I would start with these comparison engines:

shopbot.com.au - This is FREE to list in, but only caters for Computers and Consumer electronics categories.
shopping.com - shopping.com is an eBay company with hundreds of thousands of visitors each month to their main shopping.com and doorone.com.au websites as well as affiliated websites such as ninemsn.com.au. Although getting your products listed with shopping.com costs money it is worth trying to see if the sales results justify the cost of listing. If your after lots of hits to your site then this is definitely worth a look.Should the above proove successful then switching on all the below (No particluar order)

myshopping.com.au - A smaller shopping comparison website however seem to be gaining momentum.
buythis.com.au - An eWay company.
getprice.com.au - Similar in scale to shopping.comFor International Merchants:

shopzilla.com
shopping.comWARNING:

Most of the shopping comparison engines charge on a pay-per-click basis. Therefore before starting any shopping comparison engine listing campaigns you should make sure your site is completely finished and ready to go, including looking its best because you need to impress each and every one of your visitors when they arrive at your site.

[Gondwana]

Just an update on my early attempts to use the Shopping.com Data Feeds. Generating the data feed with Ezimerchant was easy enough, as was importing the xml file via the shopping.com merchant interface but at that point I have begun to hit some hurdles with category mapping. While the categories I use on my site (www.gondwanaonline.com.au) make sense in the context of my site, they do not match the categories used by Shopping.com and hence almost 100% of my products got dumped in non relevant categories, mostly in 'miscellaneous'. Enter Shopping.com's remapping tool. Alas, not very helpful at all. I was only able to match the items to a high level category of Outdoor and Sports after which every item went into a permanent state of "your product is in the process of being remapped". Having trawled through the limited help files on Shopping.com, which are only very basic, I contacted their help desk who replied by email very promptly. A few back and forwards of emails and I now have an AU Taxonomy file for Shopping.com (not available from their online help files - you'll only find UK and US there). I will now try my hand at editing the XML file generated by Ezimerchant and reloading my products into shopping.com. Questions; 1/. Short of remapping my entire website product and category structure to bring me in line with Shopping.com's broad categories, can I make changes within Ezimerchant so that my future feeds have the correct category taxonomy for shopping.com? 2/. Given that the xml file generated by Ezimerchant is of limited to no use unless I can achieve 1 above, what is the benefit of paying the monthly data feed fee since once I have generated an xml file I have to edit it manually anyway. What am I getting for my fee? I hope this post is relevant to other members. I did a google search for shopping.com forums and ezimerchant came up on top. I know anecdotally that others are very frustrated with Shopping.com's category mapping interface so I thought this was relevant. Cheers, Chris, Gondwana Online

[Gondwana]

After a couple of weeks into trialling the shopping.com feed I have some additional feedback. Firstly, I have to say that sales did increase after implementing the feed. After multiple emails back and forwards with their support, I'm beginning to grasp how their categorisation works and have made some limited progress there.

Once you generate your feed and subscribe, their bot trawls your feed and your products are allocated into categories using algorithms which seek keywords in the product title and description. To help this algorithm you need to title products with [brand] [title] [type]. for example, if you were selling a car your product title should be along the lines of "ford falcon sedan". This is all good if you're selling lots of big branded items but doesn't work so well for things that are not of a major brand (what's the "brand" of a book for example). You also need to try to make your category names match theirs and this is where I am guessing the main hassles are for most traders. It is certainly an ongoing problem for me as many of my categories, which are fine in the context of my site, www.gondwanaonline.com.au, have little or no relevance to shopping.com's categories and hence their algorithms drop the products into either irrelevant categories or dump them into 'miscellaneous'. I am guessing their approach of limiting categorisation control by vendors is to stop vendors from cross categorisation but the reality is that it reduces hits and makes click throughs less qualified. Judging by some of the comments I have heard, this seems to be a common complaint of vendors using shopping.com.

There is a limited work around. If you can edit the data feed generated by Ezimerchant, you can change the categories to match Shopping.com's taxonomy and upload your edited version over the top of the one genrated by Ezimerchant but this is time consuming and of course you'll have to do this every time you generate and upload your site which I don't feel is really feasible when you have hundreds or thousands of products. Alternatively, a field in Ezimerchant that used your actual product category as a default but allowed you to overwrite the category for the pupose of better matching the requirements of your data feeds would help considerably here.

I am also trialling myshopping.com.au and my experience with categorisation is quite the opposite. They actually assigned a person to look through my feed and drop each product into a category using common sense. Great! Its early days yet and can't comment on whether their program will boost sales more or less that shopping.com but it was far easier to get started that's for sure.

Hope this helps. I'd look forward to any other insights from anyone else using these feeds.

[dferguson]

Hi

Forgive me if im wrong, but once categorisation is completed with shopping.com it should remember the settings - SO, if you edited the datafeed ONCE (or got them categorised via their User Interface), and they capture the data - it is remembered for ever for those products, So future generated feeds wont require the data.

We have contemplated adding taxonomy into ezimerchant - however the problem is there is NO standard taxonomy - They are all different, so we would need to add each feeds taxonomy in to ezimercant and then you would need to select the relevant category for every single product on your site.

[ZingZangs]

I had tried BuyThis feed, during the trial period.

I had no luck at all with them and was not even able to contact them for support.

Any suggestions why this happened and which would be a better feed for me to use....remembering my store is an adult online store.

[dferguson]

From what I hear, buythis.com.au has not been pushed much by its creators. shopping.com is by far the biggest - I would try them first.

[rudeone]

Do the Google Site Maps upload to google automatically or do we need to upload them to google?

Cheers,
Rudi

[dferguson]

Do the Google Site Maps upload to google automatically or do we need to upload them to google?

Cheers,
Rudi

Hi Rudi

You just need to tell Google about your sitemap once - They then come and download it automatically from then on.

You will need to goto the Google Webmaster Tools (https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=sitemaps&passive=true&nui=1&continue=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fwebmasters% 2Ftools%2Fsiteoverview&followup=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fwebmasters% 2Ftools%2Fsiteoverview) and log in and tell Google about your site map.