Direct Feeds Into Shopping Programs

[sagerock]

Hello everyone,

I'm curious to know of those who have submitted their sites to places like dealtime and others, how you have gone about submitting the feed.

Do you spider your site and make a feed? Or do you just pull out your database files and reorganize the data in the form they need it. Or do you just have the company crawl your site?

I'm curious which approach seems to work best for you.

Thanks!

[hannamyluv]

We submit a feed due to the fact that we are dynamic. I like the submitted feed rather than the spider, due to the fact that I can then control what items go to them.

For example, the feed we do to Y! shopping was losing money. The conversion was strong but the Average Order Value was way down. So we modified the feed to drop all products under a certain doller amount. The AOV went up and the feed became profitable again. We just would not be able to do that if we were dependent on a spider.

[sagerock]

That is very helpful. It's an interesting perspective I didn't consider.

Thanks for writing.

[your_store]

due to the fact that I can then control what items go to them

I can't wait to start doing this, once I get my new inventory system set up. Now I have a standard feed that includes all items by default.

I had an interesting conversation w/ my rep from one of the comparison engines the other day. I asked whether it would be ok by them, if my datafeed contained more products than I had pages. For instance, the page for my main widget has a drop down box to choose color. Currently, this product simply gets listed as widget, but I want to list red widget, blue widget, etc individually. The thought being to key in on all those juicy "color widget" phrases.

Anyone currently doing something like this?

[PCInk]

I do my own feeds, too. I can control (as above) but can also remove all or most of the items when things get financially tight.