Brian,

We (Sewell Direct) send different feeds to the engines depending on past performance. We don’t differentiate at a product-level but by margin. In other words, if an engine has really poor performance we might only feed it products with at least $100 margin because then we only need a .5% conversion rate to be successful, which is quite attainable.

Preston

PS: One thought on people not commenting - I tend to comment more when I don’t have to login to comment. You may try using spamkarma or something like that to catch your comment spam and see if you get more people commenting…. just a thought.

Thanks, Preston. I need to update my version of wordpress, add akismet, and highlight recent comments on the side…will be done in the next month.

-b

Nope
I might to target products against engine demographics but even then wouldn’t want to limit the products from which customers could shop and compare on any site.

Hi all,

first time posting here, but have been lurking for a number of months periodically. Because each comparison shopping engine is different in the way their so called algorithms work, how they index products, how they group them, etc. we supply customized feeds to each shopping engine. I’m in the tech-retail sector, so we include or exclude products based on popularity, profitability, & a few other industry-specific factors in each comparison site.

Thanks for the comments, Preston, Paul & Buscamos. The responses through email have been skewed towards sending the same feed to all engines. Part of the reason I asked the question is because I’m trying to prioritize functionality for SingleFeed.

I personally send different feeds to different engines as each engine performs differently. Part of the optimization work I do is to make sure that I’m giving as much information as possible to the engines to help them understand my feed. The other part of the optimization is maximizing profitability on a SKU by SKU basis on each engine. One strategy for this latter part is to customize the feeds. Another strategy is to bid to $0.00 SKUs that aren’t performing well. Unfortunately, not all engines allow SKU level bidding, so this second strategy isn’t full-proof.

One other point to consider that a number of people have brought up is that marketers sometimes look at the entire shopping comparison engine channel as a whole: one engine might actually be net negative, but the overall channel (including Froogle/Google Base) is positive. And as some marketers are more concerned about revenue and less concerned about profitability (that can be someone else’s responsibility…looking at increasing site conversion rate, increasing avg. order value, increasing lifetime value, etc.), this seems quite popular. The shopping engines can drive big sales and some marketers seem content with small margins.

As for SingleFeed, the initial launch won’t support different feeds to different engines, but we’ll roll it out within a month after launch.

Thanks!
-b

Brian,

how do you plan to work w/ different ecommerce platforms & websute issues like that? I think the problem w/ small to medium sized businesses is procurring the datafeed in the first place. Are you offering a solution for this?

BTW, the only engine that I’m aware of that it’s beneficial to bid to $0 (that you can) is Bizrate/Shopzilla, they’ll then use those products for “backfill” for searches that don’t provide any/enough results.