Froogle

Googles Froogle Shopping search goes Beta

[feeder]

[froogle.google.com...]

[DeCal]

it sales a world wide service, it doesn't have ANY UK companies selling in £GBP though!
Why? and will there be?

Regards

Dean

[gsmitchell]

DeCal,

During the Beta version Froogle is only using companies that use $US money. As soon as it goes live, it should start accepting other currencies

[DeCal]

but could i sign up now before they start charging for the service which i am sure they will even though the only currency i accept is £GBP?

[gsmitchell]

DeCal,

This comes directly from Merchant Info on Froogle:

>>There are a few conditions and limitations you should know about if you're thinking of providing a feed to Froogle. This beta release of Froogle only supports U.S. online stores with English-language websites and products priced in U.S. dollars. While we plan to offer support for multiple languages and currencies in the future, we want to be sure Froogle offers the best possible experience to users and merchants before we expand the service. We will not be accepting feeds from international merchants until that time.

Froogle points users to sites where they can buy actual products from the merchants that sell them. Therefore, to be eligible to submit a feed, you must sell products via your website and ship them to the buyer. If you sell services or custom products that do not have fixed prices, use your website only to promote an offline business, or are an affiliate marketing site, your site content may be crawled by and included in Google's web search, but it will not be included in Froogle. Nor will Froogle accept a data feed under these conditions.

Merchants who meet Froogle's criteria and want to submit a data feed must allow Google to crawl their websites by removing any robots.txt files that disallow our Googlebot spider.

5. How do I request that my products be removed from Froogle?

If you do not want your products to appear in Froogle, you can stop the Google spider (Googlebot) from crawling your website by creating a robots.txt file (see Google removal information). Please note however, that this will remove your site from ALL Google search services, including Google's web and image searches.

6. How much do I have to pay to be part of Froogle?

Zip. Zero. Nada. Zilch. Nothing. Inclusion in Froogle is absolutely free. Our goal is to enable users to search over the broadest possible range of products for sale online. To do that, we're including all merchants at no charge. If you really want to pay us, however, we are more than happy to sell you advertising. >>>>

[DeCal]

gsmitchell

Thanks alot, very useful although froogle obviously isn't to my company at the minute.
Do you know how long it will be before they will go international or is all that info on there site?

Regards

Dean

[DeCal]

gsmitchell

Thanks alot, very useful although froogle obviously isn't to my company at the minute.
Do you know how long it will be before they will go international or is all that info on there site?

Regards

Dean

[Giacomo]

Do you know how long it will be before they will go international

Good question, Dean.

I'm afraid no one here knows the answer to that --except GoogleGuy maybe. ;)

[edited by: Giacomo at 4:00 pm (utc) on Jan. 3, 2003]

[sun818]

For those curious about auction site inclusion, BidVille.com announced their acceptance into Froogle. BidVille will be uploading their "Take It Now" (similar to eBay's Buy It Now and Fixed Price) items into Froogle. BidVille is another auction site with little traffic. But my guess is that BidVille feels Froogle will help bring some much needed traffic to their site.

[Namaste]

why are Froogle's results not reflecting the latest December update?

[Drew_Black]

I recently received a copy of the Froogle data feed format. I do back-end development for a number of video software retailers as well as running a price search site. A quick glance at the data being provided in the feed looks like Froogle is going to be wonderful for any video, dvd, book or music retailers with the skills to implement the requirements, which are actually quite minimal for any database driven commerce site. On the flip side, Froogle could be the recipe for a serious drop in traffic and revenue for most of the price searching sites.

[Dpeper]

Froogle personaly brings up one question for me, so google isnt doing it for the money right... but how long is it before some one throws a business plan together and raises the capital to build and mass market the super affiliate you are all afraid of?

[Drew_Black]

That's the thing. Since Froogle will be free the value of a super affiliate becomes less important to a retailer. If Froogle is as successful as Google (and I think it's safe to assume it will be) a couple of years down the road many retailers will be doing cost-benefit analyses on their affiliate programs.

Why pay a super affiliate 10% commissions (as an example) when Froogle is free? Learn to optimize your Froogle data feed and you can cut the affiliate out of the picture. That's got to be worth something on the bottom line.

Froogle won't be great at matching customers to retailers for all product types but based on the data feed format it looks like it has the capabilities to be very, very good at helping bargain hunters find some of the most popular net friendly consumer goods.

[mervynj]

Dpeper,
I think their business model would be mostly on the lines of Google itself (and their other offerings):

1. Help people find what they want quickly and reliably.
2. Show them non-intrusive ads while they are at it.

But it remains to be seen how the revenue pressures after the IPO would affect them.

-Mervyn

[mervynj]

Drew_Black,
I don't think affiliates will be wiped out as yet...atleast those that provide other value added services will certainly be around. Plus - why NOT pay somebody 10% if that is going to result in a sale. After all, one needs to pay them only on sales. But the affiliates themselves (without any significant value addition) would just get killed - like you said.

-Mervyn

[europeforvisitors]

Affiliates will always be valuable if they create sales that wouldn't otherwise occur--e.g., if someone reading about Yorkshire Terriers sees an affiliate blurb for Yorkie t-shirts and thinks, "I've got to order one of those."

Even if Froogle is successful, it won't make that kind of affiliate marketing obsolete.

[Brett_Tabke]

kicked as a refresher course in Froogle and to give those folks new to Froogle, some background info.