‘Your import rate is 87% which is pretty good.’ This is an excerpt from an email I received on Monday from a shopping comparison engine after I asked about the errors in my feed. I’m still laughing. 87% is pretty good…ok…but shouldn’t we be shooting for an import rate of 100%?

Now that I have listings on Become, Froogle, NexTag, PriceGrabber, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, and Yahoo! Shopping, I’m going to start to share the interactions I have with each of these sites. I consider every point of contact with the shopping comparison engines to be extremely important. I have 7+ choices of where to list my products – if I don’t have a positive experience and the results are sub-par, you will hear about it. If I have a great experience and the results are stellar, you will hear about it.

As I commit more resources to working with retailers and creating services to help them perform better on the comparison engines, I’m hoping that thousands of merchants will add their voices to this process. In the end, the goal is to understand best and worst practices in the industry. Personally, I will never ‘rate’ merchants, but I’m sure a vocal community of ComparisonEngine.com readers will do just that.

Expect to see a suite of merchant services (ok, it’s not a suite, but you have to admit that sounded really good!) rolled out over the next month and a half – just in time for a little holiday cheer.