Yahoo Shopping Bid Increase
Relax, it’s just the typical holiday increase that we see every year, not a permanent increase. I did just want to let everyone know about it just in case you didn’t get or see the email notice.
From November 2, 2009 through December 29, 2009 all CPC will be increased by 25% across all categories.
Deals Available!
Do you offer special promotions or deals on your products? Well if you do you should check out the features available on some of the shopping engines at no additional charge for you! However, some do have additional charges. For example, let’s look at Shopzilla.com and Bizrate.com. A single feed is used to update both of these sites, so you only have a single merchant interface to control them both and your deals will display across both sites. When you use the deals on this engine you are billed at the weighted average rate of all your PPC leads. More details on the charges can be found if you login to the merchant interface.
If you have any specials you can simple login to your account here - http://merchant.shopzilla.com/
- From the main screen navigate to the Manage Listings page.
- Now look for the Special Offers link which is about half way down the page.
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Shopping.com lowers CPC prices
I got an email the other day from shopping.com stating some category CPC prices were dropping. This actually took place on March 1. It looks like 200 categories or so will be affected. I took a quick glance through the new rate card and saw drops ranging from $.10 to $40.
If your not already listed, now is a great time to get your products up there. It will be interesting to see if other shopping engines follow suit.
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Create a tab-delimited data feed file in 4 steps
If you’ve never created a tab-delimited file before, it’s pretty simple. I recommend using some sort of spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel or if you need a free option check out Open Office.
Step-by-step
1. Open Excel or other program and create a new spreadsheet.
2. The first row in the document should contain header attributes. (Check with each shopping engine to get a list of required fields)
Say goodbye to JellyFish and SmackShopping
For those who aren’t familiar, SmackShopping was a shopping engine that offered live shopping and sort of worked in a reverse way as typical shopping sites. It has changed a bit since it was purchased by Microsoft in 2007.
It had a service called the Deal of the Day. When the Smack Deal of the Day started the price would typically be the average price you would pay at another store or slightly higher. The timer would start and the price would slowly start to drop. Here’s the catch: There is a limited supply available and they don’t tell you how many are left. The price will also only drop so low, so you need to decide
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Amazon.com Launches Game Store - FREE Games!
Amazon.com continues to flex some innovation muscle. On Tuesday, Amazon.com took its first step into the downloadable game market by launching in beta the Amazon Game Downloads store. The game store features over 600 games and nicely priced from $6.99 to $9.99.
If you are like me and prefer to play a game once or twice before you buy, then you are in luck. Every game in the store has a free 30 minute trial. Even better. Where are those free games? Visit the new game store within the next week and you can download 3 full-version games - “Jewel Quest 2,” “The Scruffs” and “Build A Lot”
Create Your Data Feed
Simply put, a data feed is just a list of products or services submitted to shopping sites in order to have the products displayed alongside your competition for comparison. Some feeds require the columns be in a certain order, so check the specs for each engine before you submit. Many sites accept a Google feed as well as other formats, so it makes a good starting place for creating them. If you have a lot of products, it may be much easier to manage your data feeds with a tool like Singlefeed. This would also make it is easier to add/remove new or discontinued products on a regular basis. However, here are the steps if you want to do it manually:
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