I went through account setup & feed submission for a number of comparison engines today. In all cases, I uploaded my feed through the account center interface. Here are a couple notes for Shopping.com and Shopzilla…
Shopping.com: Kudos on accepting Excel files rather than just .txt files (I know this is a minor point, but every little thing makes a difference). A note of advice… send out a welcome email to all new merchants. Maybe this only happens when my products go live, but when every other shopping comparison engine sends out a welcome email immediately, not having one from you is a little disconcerting. Also, once I set up the account and submitted my feed, the Merchant Account Center (MAC) said: “Not Live – Registration Complete”. How about explaining what that means…I assume it means that you’re reveiwing my account before making it live, but who knows? Finally, this could just be an error with the MAC (which I know is in BETA), but once I logged out of my new account, I couldn’t log in again…and because I didn’t get that welcome email from you, I now have no way to contact you.
Shopzilla: One BIG note here…it took twice as long to get my feed up on Shopzilla because the schema for my feed had to match up exactly with the schema for Shopzilla’s sample feed. In other words, while Shopping.com (and others) were able to recognize the Field Names in my feed regardless of the order, Shopzilla couldn’t do it. My feed had to look exactly like the Shopzilla sample feed. Also, Shopzilla seemed to find errors which didn’t look like errors to me. In the end, I couldn’t upload 4 out of 20 products.
Related Resources:
Data feed optimization strategies for Google Base, Shopzilla, and the rest of the Shopping Comparison Engines.
Self-service, affordable data feed submission services from SingleFeed.
