Comparison Shopping Engine Strategies

SELL MORE Tip Video: Yahoo! Shopping and PriceGrabber

ChannelAdvisor CEO Scot Wingo sheds some light on the recent partnership announcement between Yahoo! Shopping and PriceGrabber in this short video. For further details and to learn how this deal will affect your comparison shopping engine strategy, join ChannelAdvisor's webinar taking place January 19, 2010 at 2:00 pm ET. If you can't make it, the webinar will be archived at www.channeladvisor.com/webinars.

CSE Webinar next week - strategies for the controversial Pricegrabber/Y! Shopping change

We're receiving a LOT of questions from customers and retailers in general about the just announced / rapidly rolling out sunset of Y! Shopping to be replaced by PriceGrabber. 

• Y! Shopping merchants are confused by the options they now have
• PriceGrabber merchants are concerned about the impact from a bunch of Y! traffic that possibly won't convert as well as PG
• Y! Store owners are particularly confused and upset about their situation.

We decided the best way to get information out to folks both around what is happening, why and what to expect and most importantly - strategies for how to tackle this big change is a webinar.

Webinar

ChannelAdvisor is hosting a free webinar for anyone interested (Most likely Y! Shopping retailers and Y! Store users - maybe some PriceGrabber users as you will be impacted as well).  We'll dispel a lot of the misinformation out there, provide a good bit of data on what this means, and of course we have some strategy recommendations for all of the parties impacted.

The Webinar will be hosted by yours truly and David Harris, one of our resident CSE gurus.  It is Tuesday at 2pm and you can sign up here.  If you aren't able to make that time we always record the webinars and put them up for replay within 24hrs of the original.  If you have any questions before the presentation, feel free to include them in comments.

Yahoo Shopping Announces Partnership with PriceGrabber

Yahoo sent emails to their merchants today indicating that the Yahoo Product Submit program will close March 11, 2010.  Yahoo Shopping as a destination will continue to exist but will be powered by PriceGrabber. This means if you are advertising on Yahoo Shopping via the Product Submit interface right now, but not on PriceGrabber, and you want your offers to stay live on Yahoo Shopping, you should begin advertising with PriceGrabber to ensure your offers will continue to appear on Yahoo Shopping after March 11.

This is definitely big news in that Yahoo Shopping consistently sits at or near the top of the CSE ComScore rankings as the top receiver of unique visitors. Even though the rate of click through to merchant sites is much lower on Yahoo Shopping than other CSEs, this announcement is still a pretty significant win for PriceGrabber. And though their partner network already includes big names like AOL and CNET, this deal is sure to increase their traffic volume pretty significantly.

It is worth noting, however, that for many retailers, traffic from Yahoo Shopping tends to convert pretty poorly compared to other CSE engines/networks, so it is very possible that come March 11, the conversion rate for existing PriceGrabber advertisers will decline. The quality of the data delivered to Yahoo by PriceGrabber is likely to be higher than that of the data Yahoo was able to collect and organize themselves. It is also possible that the user experience will be changed in a way that could help conversion out, but the most likely root of the lower conversion rate from Yahoo Shopping is simply the intent of their users, which is unlikely to change. So though the user may benefit to some degree by this, the biggest beneficiaries are Yahoo, who no longer has to maintain the back end, and PriceGrabber, who gets the traffic through their network. Which of these two won out the most is unknown as it would depend on the terms of the deal.

From the perspective of the merchant, the complexity goes down a bit as one less feed is required, but an element of control disappears as well. As I mentioned in my last post, many engines don't like discussing their partner network members. They prefer to distribute all content to all partners and only back off when problems arise.

We work with merchants who have shut down their Yahoo Product Submit feeds specifically because of the low conversion rate, and they will now be back on Yahoo Shopping via PriceGrabber, probably facing pretty much the same conversion challenge but with no easy way to completely turn it off.

It's interesting that is happening on the heels of the Yahoo Search Submit Pro shutdown and just over a year after Yahoo sold off Kelkoo. Data feed marketing is clearly not a space in which Yahoo sees a future for themselves.

Original email:

Important: Product Submit changes coming soon. Action required.

Dear Advertiser,

We have important news that will affect your product listings on Yahoo! Shopping and that will require you to take action.

As of March 11, 2010, Yahoo! Shopping is partnering with PriceGrabber. This partnership will provide you with greater access to more potential customers and to enhanced reporting. It will give you the opportunity to list your products either on Yahoo! Shopping only or on both Yahoo! Shopping and PriceGrabber.

Because of this change, your Yahoo! Product Submit account will no longer be available on March 11, 2010. After March 11, 2010, to list your products either on Yahoo! Shopping only or on Yahoo! Shopping and PriceGrabber, you must sign up for a new merchant account with PriceGrabber. To ensure your products are live on Yahoo! Shopping on March 11, 2010, you must sign up for a PriceGrabber merchant account from January 11, 2010, through January 19, 2010. Signing up is fast and easy.

If you sign up before March 11, 2010, any applicable set up fees will be waived!

To start, just click the link below:

Sign up now for a new merchant account with PriceGrabber.

If you do nothing and do not sign up for a new merchant account, your products will only be listed on Yahoo! Shopping through March 11, 2010. After March 11, 2010, your products will no longer be listed.

PLEASE NOTE: If you already have a merchant account with PriceGrabber, you do not need to sign up for a new account. Your products will automatically be listed on both Pricegrabber and Yahoo! Shopping on March 11, 2010.

Your Key Dates to Remember:

January 11, 2010	January 19, 2010	March 11, 2010
Sign up for your new PriceGrabber merchant account with Yahoo! Shopping and PriceGrabber or with just Yahoo! Shopping.	Last day to sign up for a PriceGrabber merchant account to ensure your products are listed on Yahoo! Shopping and PriceGrabber when Yahoo! Product Submit is discontinued on March 11, 2010.	The Yahoo! Shopping and PriceGrabber partnership takes effect. If you have not signed up for a new PriceGrabber merchant account, this is the last day your products will be listed on Yahoo! Shopping.

If you have any questions about this change, a Customer Care representative will be happy to answer them.

Best regards,
The Yahoo! Product Submit team

2009 CSE Wishlist Review

This time last year, I wrote a series of posts about features and improvements that retailers would benefit from most. Let's take a look back and see to what degree my dreams were realized/crushed.

• More budgeting options: Unfortunately, there weren’t any steps forward here. I think this is something at least some engines would like to offer but it doesn’t get legs internally because (a) it’s probably not all that easy to enable this sort of throttling/removal mechanism and (b) it is probably seen as a revenue limiter. I still think that though it may be a short-term revenue limiter, it will help cultivate sustainable long term revenue by giving retailers a way to test the waters, understand how to manage their campaigns and find a way to succeed with consistency.  It may also be seen as having a negative impact on consumer experience since not all offers are displayed at all times, but if budgets run out mid way through the month, that happens anyway.

• More insight and control over affiliate partner sites: I can’t say I really expected this to go anywhere. The engines like to maintain total control over the traffic distribution across their networks. It is a “hidden” lever they can pull to adjust traffic or impact conversion, though in general they prefer not to. In fact, it seems like they prefer not to talk about it all.

• More/better ways to demonstrate value proposition: Here is one where we saw some movement. NexTag’s expanded promotional messaging is one. PriceGrabber also added feed fields to allow for more control over coupon  information. Shopzilla’s additional price field and subsequent call-out on their properties makes for a nice visual indicator. Shopping.com expanded their feed to allow for several new such features, though not all have been fully implemented on site. These are all positive steps but I think there is still room for growth here.

• Availability of impressions/CTR data:  No change here either. I’m not sure on this but I would guess the engines have this data and use it for their own purposes. I can see why they want to keep it under wraps, and though they may be able to increase CTR to some degree by changing the user experience, nothing drives CTR more than a strong offer. Since site changes aren’t that common, the most likely reaction an engine will have to poor CTR on an offer is burying it in lieu of a stronger offer. This is effective when the number of relevant offers is large, but on more specific queries, this falls apart because the remaining offers may all be weak. Even a basic indication of offers that are under-performing from a CTR perspective would be valuable to merchants, even if the definition of “under-performance” is not entirely clear. It at least gives the merchant an idea of which offers need to be reviewed.

Not a great conversion rate here but I can hardly complain since 2009 was definitely a year of change for the industry.

Webinar - tomorrow 11/10 @ 2pm EDT - 10 last-minute strategies and Q3 results

I'm hosting a webinar tomorrow where we'll go over the Q3 results for various companies (eBay, Amazon, Google, etc.) as well as look at the various Q4 forecasts and reveal ChannelAdvisor's October data.

We'll wrap with 10 last-minute strategies that you can implement BEFORE BLACK FRIDAY / CYBERMONDAY and get that last little bit of juice out of your holiday sales.

For you CSE Strategies readers, we're going to update you on some new CSE stats that we have and we have some CSE-specific last minute strategies to consider in the mix.

I hope you are able to make it, registration is open here:  and if you aren't able to make it, the recording will be available on the same page about 24hrs after the webinar in the 'Webinar Library' section.  The webinar is at 2pm EDT.

Comparison Shopping Holiday Rate Increase Round Up

'Tis the season for comparison shopping rate increases.

We have a whitepaper available for download with a review of the changes engines have made this year as well as details on what rate changes engines will be making this holiday season. 

We've consolidated a snapshot the rate change info onto a single page of the ChannelAdvisor Strategy and Support Center. We'll continue to update as we get more information, particularly in the UK where we only have confirmation in a few cases.

2009 Comparison Shopping Holiday Rate Changes

Part II/II - m-commerce strategies - next gen CSEs hit the mobile scene

This is part II of a II part series that I call 'm-commerce strategies for retailers'.  The two parts are:

• Part I -  m-commerce backgrounder that lives here
• Part II - Next gen m-commerce CSEs (you are here)

There have been many CSEs on the mobile platforms that pretty much replicate the desktop web experience on the smartphone platforms.  The use case is you are out shopping and you can use the CSE to see what's available on the web vs. your local store.  There are some that attempt to do local as well, but in my experience nobody does that very well because of the inventory system limitations with the big-box retailers.

In this post I wanted to introduce a next-gen CSE experience that adds a very important element that you don't have on the desktop web -the bardcode scanner.  The scanner uses OCR to read any product's barcode, pull up the UPC code and then do an automatic price search on that UPC. 

There are two UPC scanning CSEs that I wanted to call out and demonstrate.

ShopSavvy - Android UPC shopping

In 2008, a company called Big In Japan won Google's Android development contest with a UPC scanning CSE called ShopSavvy.  Since then they have continued to improve the system and now have millions of active users, making ShopSavvy the top Android application.  Here's a demo of the system:

(feed readers - there is an embedded YouTube that you may need to click through and read directly to see)

Red Laser - UPC Shopping for the iPhone

A consistently top 10 paid-for application on the iPhone is Red Laser which is produced by Occipital.  Red Laser pulls product from Amazon, Google Product Search and eBay so you if you are in those systems, you are covered (assuming your site is mobile browser friendly).  In this video we put Red Laser through the same paces as ShopSavvy:

Conclusion

This exciting new class of CSE for mobile applications provides an interesting third strategic option for retailers (mobile browser friendly, native application, UPC CSE).  For now, I suggest retailers test out these applications and make sure your products are a) showing up and b) they look great on the top smartphones.

SeekingAlpha disclosure - I am long Amazon and Google. eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor where I am CEO.  Special thanks to Delisa @ ChannelAdvisor who was our director, producer and director of cinematographer for these two demos.

Part I/II - m-commerce strategies for retailers - m-commerce backgrounder

This is part I of a II part series that I call 'm-commerce strategies for retailers'.  The two parts are:

• Part I -  m-commerce backgrounder
• Part II - Next gen m-commerce CSEs

At shop.org this year and in many other conversations with retailers, m-commerce has become a hot topic.  The success of the iPhone and it's application platform have capture the minds of consumers and retailers a-like.  Google's Android system is nascent, but with a slew of new manufacturers and networks coming on board, set to be a solid challenger to the iPhone.  Thus there will be a world with three + smartphone platforms out there:

• iPhone
• Android
• Blackberry
• Windows Mobile
• Misc

Smartphones are real and will surpass PC-web usage sooner than you think

Most retailers agree that we have some great platforms out there and more coming, but many still aren't doing anything about an m-commerce strategy.  There have recently been several interesting reports suggesting that by 2011, smartphone sales will outpace PCs.  Now PCs have a huge installed base so just because those lines cross doesn't mean that we'll suddenly see Smartphone traffic dwarf PC-web, but it is an important datapoint that should be a wake up call to retailers.  This figure shows the trend as reported by RBC:

 

At shop.org, John Donahoe revealed that eBay has enjoyed over $380m in GMV from m-commerce.

Morgan Stanley put together this chart which shows the growth of the iPhone plotted against other adoption curves such as desktop internet.

Hopefully, these metrics and charts have your attention and have you thinking about your m-commerce strategy.

What's your m-commerce strategy?

To-date, most of the retailers I have talked to have thought about m-commerce in one or two ways:

• m-commerce optimized website - You optimize your site using transcoding or browser detection to make sure that your ecommerce site works well with smartphone browsers.  This is a medium sized effort and as the smartphone browsers have gotten better, less work is actually required.
• m-commerce application (usually iPhone) - Some retailers have deployed free native applications that tap into the hardware to add features and create a richer 'native' experience vs. the 'browser-based' experience.  

That concludes part I.  In part II we'll dig into what m-commerce means for CSEs and what CSEs mean for m-commerce.  There is an exciting new type of m-commerce CSE on the scene that we'll demonstrate that gives you a third opportunity to take advantage of this rapidly growing opportunity.

Seeking Alpha disclosure - I am long Amazon and Google.  eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor where I am CEO.

Sears Testing Integration with Shop.com

Last month on sister blog Amazon Strategies, initial insight into what Sears is planning in terms of marketplace expansion was revealed. It appears that Sears has continued to move forward, at least on the CPC side, as they are currently beta testing an integration with Shop.com.

In the current configuration, third party retailer offers appears in results next to products sold by Sears Holding's brands. From running a few queries, tt appears the third party offers are listed after the native listings unless the Sears offerings relevance is extremely poor. Sears brands are always perched atop the merchant list as well. Since it's their site, both of these are expected from a user experience perspective. It's also worth noting that the product pages promote the top ranked offer significantly over the remaining merchants. When Sears carries the item, the remaining offers are at the very bottom of the page. When Sears is not in the picture, the lead merchant gets strong emphasis over other merchant offers. Many consumers probably won't even see the other offers on these pages.

This integration seems to be a big win for Shop.com, which has a solid offering but certainly not the largest product catalog in the CSE space. Since Shop.com pulls some of their offer data from the Shopping.com database, Shopping.com is secondarily looped into the Sears expansion. So if you have live listings with Shop.com or Shopping.com, your offers could be live on Sears.com soon.

The real question will become, which is the best method for advertising products on Sears.com?  The varying rate cards of Sears.com, Shop.com and Shopping.com will certainly come into the evaluation process. For example, if you are a jewelry seller, you may be best off sending your products to Shopping.com only since they charge $0.50 per click compared to $0.55 by Sears or $0.75 by Shop.com. The Sears rate card has ranges for some categories so it's hard to compare directly in those cases without more information, especially against Shopping.com where pricing is tiered by product price.

One major upside for the Sears program is the daily budget option, currently available in Amazon's very similar Product Ads program but not on other CSEs. One major downside, though, is that they are only accepting manual uploads of offer data through their interface at this time, meaning keeping prices and stock up to date is more painful.

There is also the display/exposure question. It seems likely that Sears will promote more highly the products they can monetize at a higher level. It may vary but one would think direct Sears offers would mean maximum advertising spend to Sears more often than not.

Only time will tell, but with the traffic volume Sears.com sees, this program has the opportunity to make a significant impact on existing campaigns through Shop.com or Shopping.com, especially if this goes live before the holidays.

Shopzilla EU Sites Mirror Bizrate Designs

Shopzilla UK, DE and FR have changed their designs to directly mirror that of the Bizrate sites. The Shopzilla US site does not appear to have changed at all and is still quite different from the Bizrate US home page.

The changes suggest that perhaps the burden of maintaining two different sites is more trouble than it's worth for Shopzilla in Europe. Similar layouts would certainly make site maintenance easier, as well as standardize the display advertising inventory. Though the layouts are the same, the order of categories and other content is not identical between the Shopzilla and Bizrate sites, indicating that either the content is dynamic based on user behavior, or Shopzilla is using this opportunity to test different configurations.

This change also could be good for Shopzilla users as it seemed like the content on the old Shopzilla UK home page had been there an awfully long time.

NexTag Testing a New Look

It seems that only a subset of users are seeing this, but NexTag is trying out a new look.

The home page has a larger splash area (which is currently Halloween focused), a very large search box, and more prominent navigation tabs.

The results pages are bolder and more colorful. The plus below the image lets you add the item to your shopping list, the chain finds similar products and the magnifying glass drills down to the product page (or to the retailer if no product page exists).

The price box on the right makes the offers stand out more. The big "Go!" buttons look nice, but they skip the product page and go directly to the retailer, which may have impact on conversion rate. But for the holiday shopping season, that could be a very desirable placement to drive volume. The "overview" page on Yahoo shopping and the coming Shopping.com product pages have similar "top offer" type areas, but unfortunately neither has the ability to notify merchants when they fall out of that placements. Maybe NexTag will be the first.

It's a little surprising that the NexTag logo on the results page pushes all the other content down and stands alone. Seems like a lot of white space. 

New Google Product Search Merchant Center and Merchant Blog

Google unveiled it's new Product Search Merchant Center today. The new interface consists mainly of existing features from the Google Base interface but repackaged and with some new navigation. In addition, Google introduced their new Merchant Blog. Since the vanity url for the merchant center (google.com/merchants) is much more widely focused, it may indicate that though this currently focuses on Product Search Merchants, it could become a centralized hub for retailers, integrating other Google products. Then again, it seems like having a retail focused version of AdWords with this Product Search merchant center integrated into it would make more sense.

Either way, I'm excited to see this and hope it leads to a higher level of engagement with merchants. Though the vast majority of online retailers are Google customers in some way, the only other retail specific Google vanity url of which I am aware (google.com/retail) points to Google's Retail Industry Knowledge Center, where the latest newsletter is dated April 2008.

Shopping.com Focusing on Engagement, User Experience, Traffic Quality

Historically, CSEs have been focused first and foremost on monetization, which in a CPC model generally means delivering traffic to retailers as quickly as possible. Over the last few years, we’ve seen the general tone of CSEs change to be more sensitive to merchant needs in terms of traffic quality and therefore, profitability. Shopping.com has been among those at the forefront of this shift, and over the last year or two, has taken several steps that are a direct reflection of that sentiment. Value based pricing, product level cost reporting automation, international traffic filtering, and CPC/logo pricing changes have all been well received by retailers over that time frame. Now, Shopping.com is continuing the trend by working to qualify consumers before the click, while also improving the customer experience.

In the spring, Shopping.com rolled out a new shopping experience in their shoe category. The new pages offered larger images, improved navigation, and clearer information on size and color. These changes resulted in some pretty strong stats, including a 55% increase in conversion rate. During this same time frame, they worked to expand their feed specification, asking merchants for more detailed product information. They are now looking to replicate that success in engagement and traffic quality in other categories. The new product pages they are rolling out later this year are heavy on content, integrating not only the merchant data from the expanded feed specification but also more detailed product rating info and third party video content. To help users find products more easily, they’ve improved their search algorithm. And not to be left out of the social networking trend, Shopping.com is introducing MyShopping pages to allow users to save favorites, create shopping lists, and generally spend more time on Shopping.com.

One thing is certain: the Shopping.com team has been very busy. They’ve built some significant enhancements to their program and are clearly working to strengthen their value proposition in the hopes of building a more loyal user base. In doing so, they’re stealing Bing Shopping’s thunder as a more effective “decision engine” through delivery of more relevant content, and positioning what their algorithm sees as the few “best” offers above the fold on the new product pages. (However, Shopping.com is not giving away money the way Bing is.)

Shopping.com is trying to strengthen its value proposition to merchants, too. Many CSEs have product rating content on site, either within their own system or powered by a third party. However, Shopping.com is putting a new twist on this by rolling out a product rating function that can integrate into retail sites at no charge. This allows retailers to gain such functionality at no cost, which is a big plus for smaller retailers. Shopping.com can then use that aggregated content on its properties. This effectively places them in competition with the PowerReviews Express product, though the enterprise level solutions of PowerReviews, BazaarVoice and Easy2 Technologies are likely not a long term competitive target.

Definitely looking forward to seeing the impact of these enhancements, and to the continued trend of delivering qualified traffic.

Come see us at shop.org

Shop.org's Fall annual summit starts later today in Vegas and ChannelAdvisor has a full crew.  In addition to our booth (#401), we have a full demo-room where we can give you a coke+cookie and show you a more comfortable walk through of our software for CSEs.  I have a fair amount of booth time so hope to see CSE Strategies readers there and answer any Q's you may have and talk about any topics you'd like to see us cover in the future.

Bing cashback webinar tomorrow - ChannelAdvisor + Bing / Microsoft

Tomorrow, September 15 @ 2pm ET, ChannelAdvisor is excited to co-present a webinar featuring Bing's cashback program.  I'll be the MC and we'll have Bruce Curling who runs BD for Bing's cashback program.

I was reviewing the presentation with Bruce today and learned quite a bit about the program that (even though I've been tracking it closely) were news items to me and helpful datapoints I've never seen before.  For example, did you know there are some interesting differences between Bing SEARCH cashback and Bing SHOPPING cashback?

You can register online via www.channeladisor.com/webinars today - or just click here.

Google Advertising Product Search on AdWords

We recently noticed that Google is "buying" AdWords ads that point to Google Product Search pages. This seems to be focused on very generic terms such as laptop, shoes, and digital cameras. Most of the ads we've seen have been in position five through nine, but in some cases, as high as two. In all cases, the landing page for the ad is just a search on the original query or a very similar term, meaning from the user's perspective, it is just like clicking on the "shopping" link at the top of SERPs.

Back in 2006, Google commented on the use of AdWords to promote their own products. Though there is quite a bit of language here around tools, algorithms, and quality scores, the relationship between the budget assigned to campaigns and the value to Google is not discussed in much detail. Google has indicated that "aggregators" that do not contain "original content" are likely to generate low landing page quality scores, which would need to be offset with high bids or click through rates. It's hard to know what the CTR is on these ads, but since Google is essentially paying themselves, it doesn't really matter. Their budgets can't literally be anything but they can certainly bid aggressively. The only thing they really lose is opportunity cost of other advertisers in those slots. Instead of selling that space, Google is driving this traffic to product search pages, which do contain ads, but not ads that are any different or better than the SERP the user is being taken away from. This implies that Google wants to drive users to product search links, which are currently not monetized, instead of ads that are monetized. It's possible they just want to build awareness of Product Search, but if these ads vanish, many users will not be able to find their way back to Product Search next time.

This is certainly good news for merchants with strong placement on Google Product Search pages for very generic queries like those on which Google is currently bidding as it could result in spikes of free traffic. It's not good news for other "aggregators" such as comparison shopping engines, who not only now have another competitor in AdWords, but are paying someone other than themselves for advertising and are therefore constrained by costs and performance metrics. This is also true for retailers, marketplaces, and any other AdWords advertisers bidding on these terms as a new competitor with effectively no budget constraints that are not bound by the same metrics has entered the playing field.

This has a wide range of implications for users, advertisers, and for Google. Just on the few queries that we identified, using Google's own traffic estimator tool, we estimate this to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars of monthly spend. That is lost money for Google, but also lost business for other AdWords advertisers. We'd love to hear from readers on what this means for your business.

Bing Double Cashback ends Aug 27

Bing notified merchants via email yesterday that their highly successful double cash back promotion will end August 27th. The exact end date was previously unpublished.

Internet Retailer reported last week that Bing requested some merchants pull back on their cash back offerings to help extend the life of the program. The article suggests a few retailers of high dollar items were soaking up an unusually large percentage of the available funds that were making the program more difficult to sustain, but it's possible that the success of the program surpassed even Bing's own forecasts. Either way, consumers and retailers are both winners. Bing certainly benefited as well, both in terms of traffic/users and press. There has been significant coverage of the double cash back promotion, and rightfully so. Our data shows a massive increase in traffic and sales, with total revenue across our customer base more than doubling and some merchants seeing increases of 5X or more.

Shopping.com Makes Some Display Changes

I noticed this evening that Shopping.com has made some changes to the way offers display on their site. See screen shots below as well as some comments.

1) Category Drill Down: After running a search, the category drill down options are now appearing in a large box above the search results. They are much more visible than in the previous layout, but have pushed the offers down the page a bit.

2) Grid View: With the exception of the shoe category, which does not appear to have changed, every other product type I searched for resulted in a grid view instead of the previous list view (the list view is still available but not the default). This definitely allows consumers the chance to see more products at once and is  a better use of space on the site. It also effectively makes positions 2-5 much more visible, almost on par with position 1. This suggests the possibility for more traffic in those positions. In addition, product level ratings are displayed when the user hovers over the item.

I like all of these aspects, but also have some concerns. There is a quick view function that allows consumers to see the full title, description and a larger image. This is good, but requires a click on a small graphic in the upper right corner of the item, which suggests minimal usage. The majority of the clickable area for each item drills down to the product page, or in the absence of a product page, takes the user directly through the the retail site. For items for which there is no product page, this may result in lower quality traffic, mainly because titles appear to be truncated at 40 characters. In some cases, this eliminates key terms that help describe the product, meaning the user may see a less than desirable level of information about the item before clicking. Since the majority of the clickable area goes through to the retailer site for items with no product page, it seems likely that retailers will receive clicks from users who don't quite know enough about the product to make a purchase decision and are simply looking for more information about the product, resulting in a lower conversion rate. The image text does show the full title for items without a product page so that may help offset this.

In addition, logos, merchant ratings and the stock description field (which acts as a free text promotional field) are only appearing on the quick view and are not visible in the initial grid view. These three elements are key to communicating a retailer's value proposition.  I'm pretty surprised that merchant ratings have been removed from the initial view since they seem to be heavily weighted in the Shopping.com algorithm and because establishing trust is such an important part of any online shopping experience. This seems to favor larger merchants whose brand can convey trustworthiness, even though their Shopping.com rating may be lower than a smaller, less known retailer.

3) Green Prices: Prices in all views are being displayed in a large, bold, green font. This makes the prices very easy to see, which is great. In the Grid View, the total price (including shipping and tax) is smaller and not green. I'm not sure why this would be the case, especially since the product page price behavior has not changed. On those pages, the total price replaces the base price completely, which makes sense to me.

4) "Free Shipping" in Red: In the previous design, the free shipping call-out was a goldish color that did not stand out very well. The red version is much easier to see, and since it something consumers look for and retailers leverage significantly, especially during the holiday shopping season, this makes a lot of sense.

I think it might make sense for the quick view to appear on hover, meaning the consumer would see the full title, description, logo, merchant rating and stock description before having a chance to click. But I guess that makes it an awful lot like list view. Overall, it seems like the impact on items that have product pages will be minimal, but it's difficult to say the same for items with no product page. 

 

Google Product Search Requests Larger Images, Adds New Attribute

Google just announced a new attribute and requested merchants send larger images via a post on the Google Base blog.

The new attribute, "online only," allows retailers to indicate which products are available exclusively on their website versus other channels such as brick and mortar or catalog. The coordination of online and offline activity is a major focus for retailers, so it is makes sense that Google would want to start collecting this information. It could suggest future ties in to Google Local/Maps, allowing customers to quickly find the closest brick and mortar location where an item is available. If you want to ensure your store locations appear in Google Local, you can enter details here.

The request for larger images is one we've heard from many other shopping engines over the last year or so. The primary focus of this is likely to help create a better user experience for consumers, encouraging them to return. It may indicate that plans for an image hover feature or other preview function are in the works. From a merchant's perspective, there is no downside to providing the largest images possible. A high quality image experience on a retailer's site can help improve conversion, and a similar implementation on a comparison shopping engine should improve the traffic quality delivered to retail sites.

Free ChannelAdvisor white paper - online shopper's behavior

Based on feedback we received at our Catalyst conferences where we have an online consumer panel that retailers love, we started doing a bi-annual survey of consumer online buying behavior.  The 2H09 version is out now.   This information is something I think every online retailer, regardless of size should read and understand as you make your Q4 plans.  You can download the white paper here.

Highlights

Here are some highlights of what consumers told us in the survey:

1. Consumers are spending about the same amount of time online but are spending less money – scouring the Web for deals that yield higher savings and offer extra value above and beyond low prices.
2.  Shoppers don’t necessarily realize where they purchase and may not understand how Google Product Search and other comparison shopping engines function.
3. Amazon and eBay are top-of-mind retail brands, but Amazon commands twice the mindshare of eBay.
4. Free shipping and peer ratings/reviews hold more influence over purchasing decisions than they did in 2008.
5. 70 percent of consumers said they regularly purchase from eBay or Amazon.
   
6.  81 percent of consumers begin their product searches with Google and 11 percent begin with Yahoo – which is an increase of five percentage points in favor of Google, and a six percent decrease in Yahoo usage.
7.  Bing is making a quick impact since it launched on May 28, accounting for two percent of searches and 13 percent of respondents already having used Bing Cashback – a share that will grow in light of the recent Yahoo/Microsoft search deal.
8.  Shoppers are diversifying the comparison shopping engines they use to research products, prices and deals. We discovered some useful trends by comparing consumer behavioral data to actual internal sales data from thousands of online retailers that make up the ChannelAdvisor customer base.

The white paper goes into tons of details on these items, and they are strategic tidbits to plan your Q4 marketing plan.  Is Bing in your mix?  Have you diversified your CSEs?  Which search engines are you spending time on and does it match the consumer-side?

We hope this enables you to align your resources and plans to have a successful Q4!

SeekingAlpha Disclosure: I am long Amazon and Google. eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor

Google Product Search Webinar Follow Up - Part 3

Yet more Q&A from our Google Product Search webinar:

Q9) Does it make any difference to send 2 different product feeds for Google Base and another for Froogle? or just one for Google Base?

A9) We're not sending any legacy Froogle feeds any more but I am aware of an instance where Google was still processing and using a legacy Froogle feed as recently as a few months ago. However, keeping those live in addition to a Base feed is superfluous when the feeds contain the same products. If the ID values of the items in the two feeds are the same and are tied to the same account/domain, the feeds are just overwriting each other.

Q10) You mentioned sending a feed every day.  Is that necessary if there is no change to the list of products?

A10) I wouldn't say necessary, but I will still suggest it. The webmaster video we pointed to talked about the importance of freshness so automating a daily process helps ensure you aren't penalized. That being said, I think if you missed a day once in a while the effects would be minimal, probably not even noticeable. But only sending a feed once every three or four weeks is definitely not ideal.

Q11) How can we distinguish (in Google Analytics) between organic results traffic and GPS-originating traffic?

A11) You can add campaign variable tags to the URLs in your feed. Google doesn't allow for redirect tracking in Google base feeds but any and all parameter based tracking functions are allowed. See here for more from Google Analytics.

Q12) Do you know if Bing is on the Google approved list to send along pixels when checking out trough Google Checkout?

A12) Since Google and Microsoft are direct competitors, it did not surprise me that I did not find Bing on the list of approved tracking partners for Google Checkout. Atlas still is, however. I don't recall when Atlas was added to this though I would guess they were present since Google Checkout launched and therefore that they were grandfathered in . It also could be that Bing didn't even try to become part of this list. (Update: Siva Kumar points out that Jellyfish is on the list. I assume that means if you have the old pixel installed it will continue to work. The new pixel documentation contains tracking on the Bing domain, so I would guess for merchants installing the current pixel, Bing will not see Google Checkout orders.  Thanks, Siva!)

Q13) (a) Does having Products duplicated affect results? (b) Does your Ranking, eg Alexa ranking have any affect on the position you appear in Google Shopping?

A13) (a) Duplicated content is generally frowned upon. If multiple domains with the same product content are found by Google to be part of the same company, they will shut all but one of them down. If you submit the same product content multiple times with different ID values, you are really only hurting yourself as you are putting yourself at risk of having your account disabled. In addition, you are potentially spreading your own traffic out across multiple records in the Google database. Since it is very likely there is some sort of popularity aspect to the algorithm, doing this is probably hindering the ability of a single instance of that product to gain traction.
(b) Since Alexa is owned by Amazon, I doubt Google has access to that data. Even if they did, I'm not sure they would use it since they are more likely to trust their own metrics. It was suggested long ago that the page rank of the product URL played a role in the algorithm. I've tried testing this before but haven't found anything conclusive, mainly because most product pages don't have page rank. If the page does have rank, it could play a role but it doesn't seem to be strong and in my opinion, this makes sense. Page rank is typically correlated to authority on a topic and justified based on strength of content, but strong content does not suggest best retail offer. Price and customer service (quantified through merchant ratings) are much more important to most consumers than web site content and therefore should be weighted more heavily.

Google Product Search Webinar Follow Up - Part 2

More Q&A:

Q5) Google suggests a 30 day expiration period for products. Is there value in optimizing this attribute? for example, does it help to set a 7 day period over a 14 day period?

A5) I haven't ever given this much thought. My first instinct is to maximize the time in case something goes wrong with feed processing on either your side or Google's. That being said, this does seem to tie on some level to their emphasis on data freshness, but it seems unlikely to me that this would be an algorithmic aspect. I see it more as a boolean, either expired or not expired.  Because of that, I don't think I'll be encouraging anyone to test shorter expiration dates as it seems like too much of a risk, but if you are feeling bold, there is always a chance it could pay off to give it a try.

Q6) Google only allows 70 characters in the short description.  Are only 70 characters actually used in the matching algorithm or is it just a display consideration.

A6) I've tested this many times and the data does not appear to be ignored by the algorithm, but it's possible that it could be treated as less important. One way to combat that possibility is to repeat the title at the beginning of the Google description. It's also possible it is already considered on par with the description. However, I see items with more than 70 characters in the title at or near the top of search results pretty often so there doesn't seem to be any harsh punishment in place. 70 is an arbitrary number so there is no reason to think the data less relevant because it sits at the 71st character.

Q7) a) You mentioned that dramatic changes can have a negative effect on your feed. would you say something like adding shipping to your entire file would fall within dramatic? And if so, do you think removing it would be just as dramatic of a change and instead best to just wait it out? b) Does the Amazon Product Ads require UPC code like Amazon Marketplace does?

A7) a) Anything that involves changing all line items in the feed definitely qualifies as dramatic, but for shipping specifically, I would suggest implementing it. This is especially true if you have free shipping on your items because I feel users are likely to use the "free shipping" filter. You could argue that since traffic is free, it makes sense to NOT display all information in order to give the user more incentive to click through, but I think shoppers are likely to gravitate to where shipping rates are easy to find. b) UPC is not required but it definitely helps Amazon in their matching and categorization process. If you have it, I suggest including it. If you don't include it and your product should be associated with a product page but does not get associated with it, you will probably miss out on exposure because that product page will get the majority of the traffic.

Q8) Any idea on how much is Bing's CPA rate?

A8) You set your own rate, but please note that the rate will impact rank on matched pages (via low to high price rank) and could be part of the results algorithm as well, so the more aggressive you are, the more likely you are to be found. We've seen some retailers experience a noticeable increase in sales when they increase the commission rate.

Google Product Search Webinar Follow Up - Part 1

Thanks to all those who joined us on Thursday! We got a lot of questions and though we answered quite a few at the time, there were many more we just couldn't get to. We want to answer them all but also want to make the answers visible to other attendees, so we'll be answering a few at a time via this blog. If you didn't get a chance to ask a question on Thursday or have thought of one since then, feel free to post as a comment or email to csestrategies at channeladvisor dot com.

Notes: You may see only part of your question appear on one of these posts. If some part of your question is very specific to your business, expect an answer via email to that part. If some part was already answered, we likely will not repeat it. Also, if you have an experience that differs from what you read here (which wouldn't surprise us considering the fluidity of the GPS system) please share!

First a few links.
Google Base help form: This will help guide you through some commonly encountered issues with Google Base/Product search.
Google Help Forums: Community driven forums but Google folks do participate.
Google Error form: Use this if you are getting an error and can't get it cleared up through help form or the forums.
Google Webmaster Video on GPS best practices: There are a few valuable nuggets of info in here.
List of Google Rating Sites: The most complete list I've seen and some good conversation about GPS in general, courtesy of SEOmoz. I can't say I agree with everything on this page but since the GPS algorithm is hard to pin down, different omerchants are likely to see different results.

Now on to questions:

Q1) Is GPS scraping the web reviews or in active feed partnerships with the review sites?

A1) I've never asked this directly but I read on the forums once that it is done every so often, i.e., not regularly, suggesting it is a scrape. I would say this is consistent with what we see. Sometimes a merchant's ratings are totally missed even though they are easy to find (via Google of course) and sometimes they lag behind significantly in terms of freshness. I just saw a merchant rating on PriceGrabber from the 18th that is not appearing on the merchant's GPS review page more than a week later.

Q2) I recently saw that the Google tag product_type is now being used in the Google product search as categories  in the filter options. Do you think it is important to map categories to google product_types, rather than use out current categories as custom product_types?

A2) My guess is that most users don’t use the filter options on GPS pages. For one thing, the GPS pages are probably not the main source of traffic for GPS listings. The “one-box” we talked about on Thursday, which appears on regular Google SERPs, likely comprises a much larger percentage of traffic and those pages don’t have such filters. Second, the Google user experience is all about searching, so I think users are more likely to alter their query than they are to look for/use filters. Finally, Google used to place such filters on the top of GPS pages but moved them to the bottom, probably because they were rarely used. That being said, Google definitely wants merchants to use the existing taxonomy. Consistent classification makes data much easier to organize and use. Google hinted a long time ago (before the new taxonomy rolled out) that creating your own product type was not a great idea but I'm not sure if this is still true. Doing so won't cause the item to fail but I would suggest not creating your own values if you can avoid it.

Q3) When Mark and Scot were talking about ways to structure variation relationships I didn’t quite under stand what they meant when talking about separated by comma.  Our data feeds are built and adjusted using excel, but saved as text files (tab delimited).  One of our big sellers is bedding, including sheets, would it make more sense to continue to have each color, each of which has a unique MPN, in a separate line or do something more connected?  And if it would improve our ranking to connect the different colors of each item, what would be the best way to do that? Finally, if the product type doesn’t exist in the GPS taxonomy, does it do any good to make your own?

A3) The reference to the use of a comma as a delimiter was not intended to refer to the delimiter of the entire feed. We just meant that submiting variant options in a comma separate list in an attribute and/or the description was a good idea if you choose to send parent SKUs in the feed. So if you had a sheet set in five sizes, instead of sending five line items, you could send one line item and include in the "size" attribute "king, queen, twin, full" or whatever sizes are actually available. If you did this, you could also include a comma separated list of MPNs in the mpn attribute (though you only want to send one ID value). The potential move from parents to children or vice versa is a significant change and shouldn't be taken lightly. I don't do a ton of shopping for bedding so I'm not sure how the typical bedding shopper searches.  However, when I search on "blue sheet set" in GPS, almost every item in the first ten results also has the size, even though I did not include the size in the query. This makes me think the size is primary for consumers. Try the same with "king sheet set" and see that most top results do not include color. Doing what competitors do isn't always the best answer but I think it's unlikely you'll rank well on queries with the size only if you also include the color in titles. If you have any data that suggests how bedding customers shop, I would consider that in your decision, but based on this quick test, I would say you definitely don't want to send separate colors with comma separated lists of sizes for sheets. With regard to the product_type attribute values, see question 2.

Q4) Strategy 5 talks about expanding into low risk CSE's and specifically talked about Bing.  Given that Bing shopping is buying a product feed from shopping.com (and we send product to shopping.com) I am wondering how helpful this would be? I would love to get some insight into: (a) how the purchased feed results would rank on Bing vs. a feed sent direct to Bing (if the feeds were basically the same) and if they might cancel each other out (duplicate listing are sometimes eliminated or punished in the rankings) And (b) the economics of the CPC shopping.com feed being sent to Bing vs. the CPA direct to Bing model (in your experience which is really more profitable)

A4) Bing is displaying your shopping.com data because the old MSN Shopping platform, which is no longer visible at shopping.msn.com, is still active behind the scenes. That platform has used data from shopping.com and pricegrabber for a long time and it continues to be used for any merchant not sending data directly to MSN/Bing. They aren’t allowing for duplication – Bing listings appear in lieu of anything coming through the old msn shopping platform (which as I said includes shopping.com and pricegrabber). In terms of rank, the answer can vary depending on whether or not there are other merchants selling the exact same item. If so, your listings sent directly to Bing would likely appear higher than your current shopping.com listings because the default sort on product pages on Bing is price low to high, but (here is the important part), the price displayed is NET of the cashback to the consumer. Look at this page and expand the little plus symbol. You’ll see the actual price is higher than what Bing is displaying, meaning the Bing advertiser is getting a boost by participating in the cashback program. In this case, it didn't have an impact on the rank of that item within the page, but if they increased their cashback offering from 8% to 15%, they would rank first.

For items where there is no direct competition on the product and therefore no matched page, I would guess Bing still gives weight to merchants in the cashback program, but the final ranking is likely heavily determined by the user’s query and some sort of popularity (historical traffic/CTR). This probably applies to how the product pages themselves are ranked in search results as well.

With regard to profitability, I would say the majority of the time, a CPA model is preferred. As mentioned in the webinar, it limits risk, but also because of the nature of the Bing model, it gives you a lever for testing the Bing market specifically. What I mean is, you can try increasing your cashback from 7% to 10% on Bing, effectively lowering the price just for Bing users, and seeing if that drives an increase in volume. Even at a lower margin, the higher volume may mean more total profit.

More to come!

Bing Doubles Cashback for Back to School Shopping

Bing sent notice to at least some merchants (probably all) today indicating that they will be matching all cashback discounts starting August 10. It doesn't specifically say that it ends Aug 31, but it says "during August" so I assume that means it ends on or before the 31st. They will also begin a broad marketing campaign designed to increase traffic to and awareness of Bing Shopping and the cashback program.

If you aren't live on Bing yet, now is a good time to get started.

Google Product Search Webinar next week - how to counter the severe drop in traffic to GPS

In mid-June, Google made some changes that have caused traffic from GPS to plummet 60%+ for merchants in the UK and around 30-40% for those in the USA. 

Due to the flood of inbound calls and queries we've received from retailers who saw their GPS traffic literally drop off a cliff, we've been doing some deep-dive analysis of what's going on and strategies to counter the drop.

We decided that this information is important enough that we wanted to open it up to all retailers so we're hosting a webinar next week - July 23rd @ 2pm ET.  In the webinar, we'll go over the detailed internal and external data of what's going on with GPS and offer 10 strategies to counter the changes Google is making.  Unfortunately, there are no silver bullets, but we hope to arm you with 'silver pellets' that used together can recover most if not all of the losses.

The details and sign-up for the webinar are located here.  There will be a recording for those unable to make it.

Condition Value Displaying on Google Product Search Result and Product Pages

Condition value is displaying both on results pages and product pages for some Google Product Search users. This is not too surprising considering Google recently made the condition attribute a required value.

The condition, or conditions in the case of product pages containing offers of more than one condition, appears next to the product price. In addition, a "New items" check box that filters out non-new products from the result set appears at the top of the results next to the checkout and free shipping check box filters.  On the product pages themselves, a condition column is visible as well as a similar check box filter for new items.

This is great news for consumers in terms of usability. It's frustrating as a consumer to see a great price on a laptop only to click through and find it is not the new computer you were hoping to buy. I think it is likely that older computer and consumer electronics products will start to fall out of high positions, rather than be artificially anchored to the top by traffic from users who don't realize they are clicking on offers are for non-new products.

Google Experimenting with Additional Product Results

**Clarification - we just heard from a Google spokesperson.  They informed us that the screenshots are actually NOT the Google Products Ads test, the experiment has not started yet.  This is some other experiment.  It will be interesting to see what the official 'Google Product Ads test' looks like.

It's always fun to stumble across a Google test. Phillip Lennsen over at Google Blogoscoped posted today about a new Product Ads feature in the Google Affiliate Network, so this may be part of the testing for that. The screen shot below shows two sets of shopping results on a standard Google SERP for "crocs mammoth." The lower shopping result set is the often seen "one box" area powered by Google Product Search feeds, but the upper set is something we haven't seen before.

The first two links go directly to Shopping.com. The last goes to Campmor but it is a Shopping.com network link. It's hard to know for sure if this is unique to Shopping.com at this time or if more searches would eventually result in content from other sites, but about a dozen queries yielded nothing but Shopping.com links. Some went to Shopping.com product pages while others went directly to the advertiser's site, including Amazon and eBay.

Several things are confusing about this. It's almost as if Google has become part of Shopping.com's partner network, but if this is in fact Product Ads testing, it's possible they just selected Shopping.com as a test partner. Either of these is a little puzzling considering past tensions between Google and eBay (Shopping.com's parent company).  Aside from the fact that Google and eBay historically don't play nice, why would Google insert a second set of product data instead of working to monetize Google Product Search? Maybe they'll replace the one box with this product set? How is this better for users than Google Product Search content? How can merchants optimize a single data feed for both Google Product Search and Google Affiliate Network considering they likely use different algorithms and may be directly competing for SERP real estate?  Curious to say the least.

I'm also not sure what impact this will have on merchant's Shopping.com experience in the short term. If this continues/expands, traffic could ramp up significantly. Google Product Search conversion rates are generally good, so hopefully that would carry over to the direct links to retail sites, but I wonder how users will react to going from Google results (at the very top of the page in some cases) to Shopping.com, and then through to the merchant (or not).

Some of the links we found go to a page where we have a tracked item live so we'll keep an eye out to see if traffic changes significantly for those items.

Some other screen shots (a little grainy unfortunately):

Ciao US Goes the Way of MSN Shopping

Microsoft announced today that Ciao in the US will cease to exist as of July 1. Feeds will no longer be processed and the Ciao.com domain will redirect to Bing Shopping.

This pretty much ties up to the MSN consolidation in the US. Ciao will no doubt continue to exist in Europe. The real question is if and how they will more formally integrate Ciao with Bing in Europe. Right now it just redirects from Bing to Ciao, which is a little confusing from the user perspective, but maintains the SEO advantage of the already popular sites and leaves intact the social aspect of Ciao as well. I imagine the Ciao US social network never grew significantly, but the European network is probably pretty substantial, so Microsoft won't want to lose that aspect. We often see for sites with more of a social focus such as Ciao that the unique visitor numbers, and therefore impressions, are significantly raised, even if click-throughs to merchants are relatively lower. This suggests a higher revenue opportunity from display advertising, which makes one wonder why display ads on Ciao are scarce.

CSE Strategies and Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition (IRCE)

CSE Strategies readers - today kicks off the annual retailer confab - IRCE in Boston.  We'll be there in force and it is certainly a big year for comparison shopping engines so there will be lots to see and learn on all topics CSE.

We've put together this handy CSE Strategies guide to IRCE here so you can optimize your IRCE time and learn as much as possible.  ChannelAdvisor will be in booth 749 and there are 10+ engines that will be present.  Any of our representatives will be able to discuss all of the changes coming up with CSEs and how our software can help you manage CSEs.

If you want to meet at the show, shoot me an email or tweet, or stop by the booth.  CSE Strategies readers will get a free smoothie - so mention you are a reader at the booth for a cool (literally) treat.

As a value added service, we've provided two handy cheat sheets so you can do the 'CSE Strategies' tour of the show floor. The first is Alpha by company the second is by booth.

Alphabetical CSE Strategies Guide to IRCE

Company	Booth	Comments
Become.com	244	CSE 2.0 engine - seeing some good growth
Bing.com	813	The newly rebranded Live.com, MSN shopping, Live shopping, Live Cashback and all of that.
ChannelAdvisor	749	Best software available to manage CSEs - bar none.
Google	707	Small search engine company with something called Google Product Search or Google Shopping (aka froogle)
Pronto	849	Division of IAC with rapidly growing CSE that has some great social elements
Shop.com	845	Shared cart CSE that has opened up to non-cart folks recently.
Sortprice	1253	Newer CSE - lots of breadth.
TheFind	422	Newer CSE - focused on breadth.
ValueClick	952	Smarter.com and pricerunner.com
Winbuyer.com	349	Put a mini CSE right on your ecommerce site so buyers can price shop without leaving - like progressive insurance for ecommerce
Yahoo!	449	Mostly pushing their store offering, but sure to have some Y! Shopping folks there too.

By Booth Number - click here for a map of the exhibit hall.

Booth	Company	Comments
244	Become.com	CSE 2.0 engine - seeing some good growth
349	WinBuyer.com	Put a mini CSE right on your ecommerce site so buyers can price shop without leaving - like progressive insurance for ecommerce
422	TheFind.com	Newer CSE - focused on breadth.
449	Yahoo!	Mostly pushing their store offering, but sure to have some Y! Shopping folks there too.
707	Google	Small search engine company with something called Google Product Search or Google Shopping (aka Froogle)
749	ChannelAdvisor	Best software available to manage CSEs - bar none.
813	Bing	The newly rebranded Live.com, MSN shopping, Live shopping, Live Cashback and all of that.
845	Shop.com	Shared cart CSE that has opened up to non-cart folks recently.
849	Pronto	Division of IAC with rapidly growing CSE that has some great social elements
952	ValueClick	Smarter.com and pricerunner.com
1253	Sortprice.com	Newer CSE - focused on breadth.

Google Product Search Announcement About Attribute Changes

 Google announced today that the condition attribute will soon be required. Valid values are new, used, or refurbished. This is definitely good news in that it suggests they will soon either display this information or filter on it. Such a change would positively impact the user experience on Google Product Search since right now, consumers don't know the condition of the item until after they click through. I've bought many refurbished items in the past, but as a consumer, it is definitely nice to be able to clearly see condition as early as possible so you don't click on a refurbished or used item when you definitely want new.

In addition to their blog post, Google emailed merchants today with the condition attribute news,  a recommendation to use their most recent taxonomy in the product type attribute, and announcement of a new attribute, "compatible_with." This new attribute is specifically targeted at merchants in accessory categories such as ink cartridges or cell phone accessories to give them a structured way in which to communicate the core product models with which their items are compatible.

Full email below:

Hello,

We'd like to let you know about an important change we're making to the Product Search data feed requirements. As you know, you can help shoppers find your products by including high quality, frequently updated product information in the form of attributes.  In order to provide shoppers with the most useful information, we'll be making the "condition" attribute required starting on June 30th, 2009. 

In order to keep your feeds active past this date, please remember to include the "condition" attribute for all of your items if you're not already doing so.  Please include one of three values to describe your product: new, used, or refurbished.

For more information on formatting the condition attribute, please visit http://base.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=148684

In addition to making the "condition" attribute required, we've made some other changes to our attributes:

Recommended: "product type" 
The "product type" attribute allows you to specify a product category for each item. We recommend that you use our product taxonomy, however, you are welcome to use your own categories.  For more information, please visit: http://base.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66818

New: "compatible with" 
The new "compatible with" allows you to specify what products your item is compatible with.  For instance, if you're listing an HP 74 (CB335WN) black ink cartridge, you can use this attribute to tell us that it's compatible with the HP Photosmart C4480 and HP Photosmart C4580 printers.  Using this attribute will help you avoid listing the same item multiple times with different compatibility information. For more information, please visit http://base.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=73932#optional

Sincerely,

The Google Product Search Team