What’s The Problem?
Every eCommerce business wants to advertise on as many channels as possible. When it comes to comparison shopping, you will want to syndicate your products to the top shopping engines. The problem is that every comparison shopping engine has a different data feed format and category structure. This creates an extra headache for the business owner. You have no choice if you want your products on their site…
The Many Solutions
Depending on the size of your company and your skill set, you have many different options ranging from hacking scripts and full service management.
D.I.Y. Style
- Download your products into Excel and copy and paste until you got it right. Any business that means business cannot do it this way. It is too time consuming and you won’t be able to update it often enough.
- Hack together some scripts to automatically create the files for each CSE. You get bonus points for automatically uploading to each CSE via FTP.
- Use a third party self service tool to syndicate your feeds self service style. MerchantAdvantage is a great desktop tool for this, it is priced at $695 per month with no limits on websites, products or CSEs.
Third Party Syndication
Use a third party system to automatically create and syndicate many feeds from one file that you upload. This is ideal for smaller eCommerce sites with approximately 5-10k products. Here are some companies that provide this service:
- GoDataFeed — Plans available for $50/$75 per month, with a 5,000 SKU limit.
- SingleFeed — Plans starting at $99 per month, with a 100,000 SKU limit.
- VersaFeed — Plans starting at $195 per month, with a 10,000 SKU limit.
Full Service Syndication & Managment
I would suggest using a small but reputable agency to syndicate your feeds, they are generally prices better than the big guys but give you a lot of personal attention. Here are a couple of such companies:
- JXT Group – that’s us 🙂
- Blue Cherry Group
- CPC Strategy
Another option is to go with a full service management solution from one of the big guys. I’ve had pretty good success with ChannelAdvisor specifically.
Do you have any experience with any of the companies listed above? Do you know of another company that provides such a service? Please let us know in the comments.
Photo Credit: alles-schlumpf
I own VersaFeed, thanks for mentioning us. We have an upper limit of 200K products but that is in the custom pricing range.
SingleFeed, GoDataFeed, and SmartFeed are all “self service” operations. CPCStrategy is the exact opposite and is 100% managed.
VersaFeed is somewhere in the middle: we create the CSE accounts, get feeds uploading, insure products are listing, and advise on bidding strategies. However, the client is still responsible for monitoring ROI performance and adjusting bids.
Thanks for the informative article!
I am co-founder of Lengow which publishes a solution for managing product catalogs http://www.lengow.com
Lengow can be referenced yours products on over 150 comparison shopping in Europe and US/Canada.
The solution (SaaS) allows creating product catalogs for each comparator, but also to optimize its products on each comparator with a multitude of features.
You can also measure the impact of each campaign with a powerful tracking solution that allows to know the profitability of each product on each and compare prices.
We developed great service for you – http://www.productdatafeed.net/.
We offer data entry, optimization of the feed, product categorization, product engines submission, analyze results (what is very important), necessary adjustments and resubmit to search engines, regular maintenance to keep the data feed up to date. What is more our customer support is available 24/7.
Good one!!! Price Comparison is the most important part of Product Listing Ads. And you provided some good tips to manage them. Thanks for this informative post.