UPDATE2: I got a second call from SDC (a couple hours after the first) saying that they would take my listings down so I wouldn’t get charged. The company is hosting 2 webcasts this coming week to introduce the new Merchant Account Center. This is the first major upgrade in 3 years. I got a preview back in April at the SDC Merchant Summit. I’ll let you know about the improvements.
UPDATE: Well, I got a call from SDC saying that while they can’t take my listings down, they will credit me for any clicks that take place over the next 5 days. I have a feeling they will have to do this for a number of merchants.
First it was Yahoo!, then it was Commission Junction, now it’s Shopping.com. I just tried to login to my Shopping.com account and found out that the Merchant Account Center is going to be down from September 16th – September 21st. Yes, I could have paid more attention to the email notification I received from Shopping.com on September 12th (I just went back to read it), but I truthfully think that 1 email entitled ‘Merchant Account Center Upgrade Notification’ is not good enough. At the very least, the title should have been ‘Alert: Merchant Account Center Down 9/16 – 9/22, Make Changes NOW’.
According to the current notification on the site, no changes can be made to my account over the next 6 days which means that merchants are going to get charged for clicks they might not want. This is poor customer service, and I expect to be credited for any clicks over the next 6 days. I was logging into the account to suspend my listings as the recent increase in PPC prices (after the summer ‘sale’) and a very low conversion rate are making Shopping.com a poor marketing channel for PersonalProtectionStore (one of my accounts) right now. To be clear, I’m not saying that I’ll stop using Shopping.com, I just need to re-optimize my feed.
I’m sure the upgrade will provide positive functionality improvements (maybe someone at Shopping.com wants to fill me in), but not allowing me to access my account for 6 days is absurd.
I was not a fan of the “shut down” but our shopping.com account manager did give us a heads up about the upgrade in late August. Problem is that he told us Sept 8-13 it wouldn’t be available. So I sent out updates to our team when in reality the shut down was not until THIS WEEK!! I appreciated the timing of his message but not the accuracy — negative points there! It stinks that we cannot access our accounts or change bids, and adds fire to my request that if we could integrate an API, and utilize our automated bid management tool, this wouldn’t be as much of an issue!
I’m surprised that they aren’t allowing GSI to integrate an API. You guys have to be in discussion about this, right? Have you talked to them about bid management on a SKU level? I really DON’T understand why they don’t allow this.
-b
Yeah, I’ve been getting the ‘shut down’ email for the last 2 weeks. The impact for me though is not as significant because my catalogs are fairly stable from an inventory perspective…
Did you guys get a web cast invite to demo the new merchant center? That’s kicking off on both Tuesday and Wednesday. That email arrived today.
[...] Posted by Brian Smith at September 18th, 2005 Ok, it’s one thing to turn away existing merchants, but what kind of experience are you giving prospective merchants when you s [...]
[...] it’s one thing to turn away existing merchants (to be fair, we were warned), but what kind of experience are you giving prospective merchants when [...]