I want to assure you that my commitment to ComparisonEngines has not wavered. I needed the last week to get SingleFeed up and running AND was busy with Shop.org (lots of posts coming this week about the conference).

While a number of people have commended me on my master plan to build out ComparisonEngines and then launch SingleFeed, I have to say that I never actually had a master plan. However, I’m definitely going to take advantage of the hand I’ve been dealt.

ComparisonEngines
With SingleFeed, I will be able to turn ComparisonEngines into a much more useful industry tool for the media, shopping engines, and merchants and become more of a traditional industry analyst. While I would never share anything about my SingleFeed merchants without their permission, I hope many of the merchants I work with will take part in surveys and case studies to be published here. At the same time, I will continue to discuss, disseminate, and analyze industry news. My goal is still to help my readers understand the shopping comparison engine industry. Which means that I will promote SingleFeed through ComparisonEngines, but I’m not going to have a link at the bottom of every post. Also, I will continue to discuss other data feed aggregators like ChannelAdvisor and ChannelIntelligence.

SingleFeed
Besides a number of scary bugs effecting new merchants on Friday the 13th (and one very very patient existing merchant), SingleFeed got off to a solid start. While the company has a long road ahead of it, SingleFeed is well on its way towards helping small and medium sized businesses submit high quality data feeds to multiple shopping engines. SingleFeed will maintain its own blog (launching soon), but will focus on issues that effect SingleFeed merchants.

And announcing…a new blog just for merchants!
For over a year, merchants have been asking me for tips and strategies that drive success on the shopping comparison engines. At the same time, I’ve probably bored many ComparisonEngines readers out of their minds with my data feed optimization (DFO) posts. Well, in a week, I’ll launch a data feed optimization blog. I’ll take learnings from SingleFeed and share them publicly so that all merchants can benefit. Again, information about SingleFeed merchants will remain strictly confidential, but aggregate learnings as I submit more and more feeds are fair game. There are a number of great forums for search engine optimization…it’s time for a central hub for data feed optimization discussions.