PriceGrabber.com New Intro Video

PriceGrabber.com is a Price Comparison Website founded in 1999 by former CEOs Kamran Pourzanjani and Tamim Mourad. The company also serves as the data source for numerous other shopping websites, including AOL Shopping, Bing Shopping, About.com's ConsumerSearch, iVillage, Comcast, Yahoo!, MSN Shopping and CNET. PriceGrabber.com claims to be the first comparison shopping engine to project tax and shipping cost information for a consumer during the price comparison process, hence offering a more complete view of final costs.

Bing Introduces Product Search and New Ad Formats: What it Means for Bing Ads Advertisers

On Friday, Aug 23 Rich Bowen on the Bing Ads Community posted an articel about the new Bing Product Search

Bing is introducing a new product search experience that will help consumers search less and do more. The new experience created by using consumer input and research, harnesses Bing’s index of 10’s of millions of individual products that have been organized by advanced machine learning to show relevant products directly in the main results page. This means that people searching for products will save time because they no longer need to navigate to a dedicated “shopping” experience to find what they’re looking for. Below we outline the steps you’ll need to take as an advertiser on Bing, to prepare for this change when it takes effect in the coming weeks.

Find it Faster with Bing Product Search

At Bing our central mission is to help you search less and do more. To that end, we’re constantly looking for ways to make your search experience more efficient. One of the central ways we do this is by better understanding what you are trying to get done and removing clicks and navigation that might stand in the way. With that in mind, we’re introducing a new product search experience that does just that.

Google Merchant Center FTP Server Update

On September 16, Google Base will be upgrading the Google Merchant Center FTP system and updating the IP addresses for our upload server (ftp://uploads.google.com).

Google Shopping New Mobile app

Google has launched Google Shopper 3.2, a new mobile version of Froogle, Google Base, Google Shopping.

Q&A about the Bing and Shopping Merger

Q) Why are you making this change right now?

A) We specifically chose this time of year to make the change because it represents the greatest
opportunity for our merchant base. The new placements will be available in Bing Shopping by
November 1st. If you want to have the opportunity to be featured in these positions, you need to act
now. Begin a relationship with Shopping.com if you don’t already have one by contacting
merchantsupport@shopping.com.

Google Products: Invalid Unique Product Identifiers

We were looing in our merchant dashboard on Google Products and noticed an error for "Invalid Unique Product Identifiers". As you should already know Unique Product Identifiers is probably the most important field in your feed as far as getting your feed processed.

If there is the slightest mistake, error or any kind of issue with the Product Identifier field your feeds wont get processed  So naturally when we saw this we got very concerned.

Bing Updates Product Search

Nextags New Brand Level Bidding

Nextag just rolled the ability to bid on a brand level. There was always the ability to add a bid in your feed. And if you had any decent tool to create your feeds you most likely would be able to increase the bid for a specific brand. But now Nextag has made it much easier for us Marketers who are not so tech savvy.

Surprising though that there was no mention of this on the Nextag Merchant Blog

But if you want a full explanation about this new feature you can find a great post about on CPC Strategy

Who is Fatbot and why should I care?

Today someone was reviewing our web logs and came across a bot we never saw before. Its name is "Fatbot". We were wondering what this bot is so we did what any person on this planet (maybe besides Bill Gates) would do, we Googled it.

Shopping.com Accelerated Feed Processing

Shopping.com announced Friday afternoon a significant enhancement to their feed processing technology. Feed updates made to price and stock availability will now be reflected on the site within 30 minutes. The email indicated that many retailers were requesting this feature and so they have complied to our wishes.

Google Product Search Email on July 11th

Thank you for participating in Google Product Search.  We are reaching out to you to inform you about important changes we’re making to our Product Search required attributes and Program Policies. All merchants will be affected by these changes.

Important changes to Google Product Search feed specification & policies Reminerd

Google Shopping is reminding everybody about their policy changes.


Starting on September 22, 2011 they will be taking action against accounts with feeds targeting the United States, France, United Kingdom, Japan, and Germany that do not comply with the new specification and policy requirements.

Read More Here

Vendio Acquires SingleFeed

It was just recenlty announced on techcrunch that Vendio has acquired SingleFeed.

Amazon Experinaces Technical Issues

Amazon has posted a Technical Notification of an issue they are curently experiancing for product ad merchants

FTC to issue subpoenas in Google antitrust probe - Google Shopping is included.

By Associated Press

WASHINGTON — A published report says federal regulators are preparing to issue subpoenas to Google and other companies as authorities gather information for a broad antitrust probe into the Internet search leader’s business practices.

Technology Partnership between Ciao & ePages

The UK based comparison shopping giant Ciao has partnered with ePages.

Shopping.com System Maintenance Notification

Shopping.com will be conducting maintenance on Monday, June 20 beginning at 10am PST until 4pm PST.



During this maintenance, FTP access will be restricted as will the ability to upload a datafeed into the Merchant Account Center.



Please note that all other functionality of the Merchant Account Center will still be accessible during this time.



Any changes to the datafeed or uploads to the Shopping.com ftp should be completed prior to 10am PST or after 4pm PST on Monday, June 20

Google Instant Pages

Google today announced at the their annual Google Inside Search Event a new feature called "Instant Pages". It save on average from 3 - 5 seconds on the page load time of the landing page.

Google wants to make the web as quick as switching a channel on your TV and they are really take a step towards this.

What does this mean for CSE? Honestly it doesn't look like it would effect it at all.

Product Specific Advertsing Using Google Adwords API

Merchant Advantage, one of the leading data feed management providers, recently announced their new "KeywordControl" tool. Some of the things they promise it can do are

• Auto create a Google ad for each of your products.
• Update and insert current product pricing in each product ad.
• Automatically stop an ad from showing when inventory is low.
• Customize ads for each product during a specific promotion.