How To Build A Comparison Shopping Feed

Building a product feed can be as easy or as complicated as you want. Ultimately there is only a small amount of information required in a feed to pass as useable. Comparison sites have a strict number of columns (attributes) that are universal. The basic and required columns in a feed are as follows (in no particular order) -

Mandatory Feed Columns

1. Price

Without the price of the products you are selling you are going to struggle to convert as well as you could do. The price column should always be inclusive of VAT. Trying to be clever and show prices without VAT will bite you hard as you will get more clicks on your products as you will seem like the cheapest. Getting more clicks may seem a like a good plan, however when these shoppers reach the checkout and see that the VAT is yet to be added you will get a lot of abandoned shopping carts.

2. Title

The title of the products you are selling is one of the most important attributes of a feed. In soft goods areas, where it is not possible to compare like for like products, keywords that describe the product best will make the biggest difference. Think of the title as your means to add as many keywords as possible to ensure it accurately depicts the product but also makes sense. Keyword rich titles will get found more often and will also ensure a stronger conversion rate once the shopper has clicked through. Key attributes to consider in a title are -

a) What is it made of?
b) What colour is it?
c) What brand is it?
d) What style is it?
e) Who is it suitable for?

3. Description

A product description is often not used on the shopping sites. However, a keyword rich few lines about a products is often really useful in optimisting your listings. Gernerally the first line of the description is all that is shown and indexed by the sites. In truth there doesn’t seem to be any reason for giving the shopping site the full ‘war and peace’ description from your site. If you have a short description which is around 200 characters then this will suffice. A good description is linked to the title and can often be used to fill with keywords for the product to raise your rankings in relevancy searches.

4. Link URL

Shopping sites generally redirect the shopper away from their site to yours, without a link to send them to you're a little stuck! It is a common mis-conception to use a generic landing page or to send them to the home page. Sending the shopper anywhere but a specific product page for the product they clicked through on is fraught with danger. If you were a shopper, clicking through to see a specific product and got taken somewhere else you wouldn't stick around long. It is common for shoppers to go straight back to the shopping sites and click on the same link to test if they did something wrong. Confusing a customer is only going to alienate them. The last thing you want is for a shopper to have a bad experience with you the first time they visit your site.

5. Image URL

In some category areas it is often unnecessary to supply images in the feed as you will be selling the same item as other merchants and hence you will be all grouped together. This is common with electronics, appliances and computing. In other 'soft goods' areas images are key. Images allow shoppers to see the products before they click through. Don't forget people browsing are not costing you money on clicks. Image URLs should always be the biggest images that you have. Most shopping sites have the facility to shrink down your images to their requirement. They will also allow shoppers to click on your images and expand them out in another window. The image size we usual recommend is 300x300 pixels.

6. Brand / Manufacturer

Brand or manufacturer information is important in the hard goods areas as the part number and the brand need to match up to ensure that your products get aligned with the other merchants. In effect the brand column and the part number column are a binary pairing that allow your products to get matched up. if you are missing the band information, but are supplying the part number you will find that the vast majority of your products end up in the 'uncategorized' or 'miscellaneous' categories. In the soft goods areas the brand information is used a means of attribution on the shopping sites, so someone can search for a pair of shoes by Jimmy Choo.

7. MPN / SKU / Part Number

This column is arguably the most important aspect of a feed for many categories. This column has two main functions. Firstly the shopping sites use this column to distinguish unique products from the feed. In effect each product is identified by this number and so each time you update your prices the product gets updated without being considered new to the site. The second reason for supplying unique numbers is that many shopping sites have to do manual mapping for products. If you change this unique number the mapping will be lost. You should never change the unique number for your products in the feed unless they are actually new.  For the hard goods areas the unique number is used in conjunction with the brand to ensure an accurate match. In most cases using the manufacturer’s code for a product is all you need to supply.  In soft goods areas there is not usually a unique number from the manufacturer. In these circumstances it is often necessary to use the EAN number or bar code number as the unique code. As long you use a number for the products that never changes you should be fine.


8. Categorization

This is probably the hardest column to get right. Each shopping site requires a very different means of conveying what the product is. For Shopzilla and Nextag they actually want a number e.g. 10315 or 72772548. Other sites want a string such as sports and outdoors > football > football goal. For most sites if you don’t give them exactly what they want your products will not get classified and will sit in a miscellaneous area and never get found. In our experience this is the most important column in the feed and the most difficult to get right. Thankfully Shop Submit already has all these categories mapped up in our system. All you need to do is map your categories to ours and we’ll match up to everyone else automatically for you. The best process to categorize your products is to be as specific as possible, even if you think it’s too specific. The best way to present this data is through a string as above. So in summary all you need to do is use a category and a subcategory as such – electronics > digital cameras

9. Stock information

Supplying products you no longer have in stock to a shopping site is suicide. Some sites may not change you for clicks on products you display as out of stock, however most will. It is usually best practice to remove out of stock items from the feed altogether. With the Shop Submit system we can remove these products for you through the feed rules we have. For Shopzilla it’s possible to bid out of stock products to zero and supply them in the feed. This way you have your full inventory on site, but not pay for the clicks on out of stock items.

10. Shipping Cost

The final important column in the feed is the shipping cost. This needs to be treated as the cheapest means of you delivering the product to the shopper.  There is no benefit to advertising your next day delivery price when 3 day delivery is free. The shipping cost is really important for all shopping sites as you will get penalized if there is no shipping cost. Frequently, merchants without shipping information will get dropped to the bottom of the list, even if they are the cheapest. In recent times the displayed price on the shopping engines includes the delivery cost. It also improves the shopping experience all round as those wasted clicks just to find out the shipping are now reduced.

 

Suggested Extra Columns (non-mandatory)

EAN

The EAN (European Article Number) is the bar code number for a product. As this is a unique number that is applicable to all products with a bar code, shopping sites have started to use this as the means to identify products. In essence the faster merchants and shopping sites adopt this as the standard the better it will be for all concerned. Some sites have started to incorporate this into their systems, however the availability of the EAN numbers is not always present, which merchants find difficult to source.

ISBN

ISBN is the unique number for books. Most book retailers will know of this number and will use it in their feeds. Shopping sites have a catalogue of ISBN numbers so this makes matching up products verty straight forward.

Condition

If the products is not new then it is best to state how the products is different. For inkjet retailers it is common to sell compatible and refilled cartridges. Supplying this data in the feed will lead to better conversion rates.

Delivery Time

Many sites have now adopted this into the listings. It gives the shopper more information about when they can expect the item often improves the conversion rate.

 

Feed Formats and Delimiters

There are currently 3 file types accepted as standards; text, csv and XML. Almost all shopping sites can accept all of these file types. The easiest and least error prone file type is text. It really is as simple as opening up notepad and writing the data into it. Text files are usually built with a delimiter, which is a symbol that is used to denote the end of a call or attribute. Shopping feeds commonly use a | pipe as the delimiter as this very rarely gets used within any site development. Another common delimiter is a tab delimited file. You can create one of these in excel. This a standard output of an excel sheet.

Along with text files you can also export data as csv from excel. CSV files are essentially text files that use a comma as a delimiter. Using commas as the delimiter is often a risky process as commas appear all over feeds in titles and descriptions. Without using inverted commas as means of denoting cell information csv files will cause all kinds of errors on trying to read the file.  When reading a csv file that hasn’t been formatted correctly the data appears all over the place causing the rows to mis-match and fail.

XML files need to be built to a site schema. In essence both sides need to be speaking the same language. XML files are notoriously difficult to create and maintain. If any part of the XML file breaks it breaks the whole feed.  We tend to avoid XML files in favour of the text file as this is the simplest and least likely to break format available.