Small Businesses Rejoice!

From time to time I’ve waned from search engine marketing and optimization to comparison shopping. In truth, Comparison Shopping Engine management should be as much a part of your search strategy as Yahoo, Google, MSN, and Ask. It is with great pleasure I share with you a new solution (still in beta) designed for that small online store.

I hope you’ve read my “Kitchen Sink” theory (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) of datafeed management which says, simply, marketers should only manage one feed for dozens of Comparison Shopping Engines (CSEs) while using a vendor to manage each of the versions that need to go to the engines. By managing one feed, marketers can better spend their time optimizing that file and ensuring it promotes everything, including the kitchen sink. This leaves the challenge for marketers of finding an inexpensive vendor since small businesses have enough costs given the rates offered by the CSEs; SingleFeed endeavors to deliver.

SingleFeed is an online self-service data feed management, submission, and optimization service through which you upload one file and they create the 8 different versions of the feed you need for Google Base, Shopzilla, Shopping.com, Yahoo! Shopping, PriceGrabber, NexTag, Become, and Smarter.com. They summarize it best themselves:

• You create and submit JUST ONE feed, as opposed to multiple data feeds.
• We manually map each product to the correct category on each shopping engine.
• Low monthly fee. We don’t charge commissions.
• Receive over $100 in FREE clicks when you sign up.