Shopping.com Data Feed Service for Yahoo Stores Launched

Aten Software LLC has launched a web-based service that allows Yahoo Store owners to submit their product catalog to Shopping.com. The new service, located at http://www.atensoftware.com/, is completely automated. Store owners simply sign up for an account and complete some online forms. The service works for any of the thousands of merchants who use the Yahoo Merchant Solutions platform for their e-commerce presence.

Shopping.com is a top-ten e-commerce destination, with an average of 45 million unique visitors a month globally. The comparision shopping site offers over 40 million products in more than 325 categories. Merchants listed in Shopping.com are charged by cost-per-click (CPC), with rates that vary by category. Shopping.com can import product data from Yahoo Store merchants directly, or via a data feed upload.

Aten Software's new service provides a data feed upload to Shopping.com. Merchants can exclude low-margin products from being submitted, something that is not possible when Shopping.com directly imports the data. The new service also submits product option keywords, and data from custom fields, such as manufacturer, Shopping.com category, brand, and age range. With these optimizations, merchants can achieve higher ROI from their marketing campaigns.

The new Shopping.com feed has similar features to the Froogle data feed for Yahoo Stores that is also offered by Aten Software. These features include flexible scheduling from daily to monthly, ability to download data feed files, catalog change detection, and unlimited products. No technical knowledge of the data feed format is necessary, and merchants can add any number of Yahoo stores in their account. Compared to manually preparing a feed file, using a software package, or hiring a developer, many merchants find that outsourcing this part of their marketing efforts to be cost-effective.

Aten Software offers a distinctive, pay-per-use pricing model. Merchants fund their accounts in advance, and micro-payments are deducted when services are consumed. Each time the Yahoo store product data is successfully submitted to Shopping.com, the charge is US$0.30. In addition to the per-use charges, an account maintenance fee of US$0.15 per day (about US$4.50 per month) will be instituted on January 1, 2007.    By comparison, other online data feed services typically charge a flat monthly fee only, with a higher total cost. As a promotion, all Shopping.com services are free of charge through January 31, 2007. In addition, new accounts receive a free trial credit.

Many Yahoo Store owners are already using the service to list their products in Shopping.com. One such owner is Jim Morrison, of eyeglass.com (http://www.eyeglass.com/). He remarked, "We could stumble through setting up the data feeds ourselves, but we don't have dedicated staff to handle the technical issues. It is cost-effective for us to have someone like Aten Software in the middle to manage our Shopping.com and Froogle feeds for us."