It’s been a little while since our last entry into the blog. Since we launched FeedPerfect on March 1, we have been busy working with customers and on new features and additional channels. We started on March 1^st offering service to 6 channels; Google Product Search, Shopzilla, Shopping.Com, Yahoo! Shopping, NexTag and PriceGrabber. In May we added 4 additional channels; PriceSavings, MySimon, PriceLeap and Jellyfish for a total of 10 channels. And more are coming soon. Our next release, scheduled for July 15^th, will add 3 or 4 additional channels. We will continue to add channels that we feel will offer value and new opportunities to our customers. And we pay attention to the channels that you are asking for.

In addition to additional channels, our next release will also include some new improvements in functionality. The wizards are being revamped to provide a better flow, better help and allow merchants to set their default categories via their store categories. The new Store Categories Mappings will also be included in the main categorization mappings.

The new Store Category mappings will add additional flexibility for merchants. Presently when you activate a channel, you have the option of setting a default category for all your Products for that feed like “Electronics->Radios”. This puts a channel category on all of your products for that channel. Since many stores are somewhat focused to a particular type of products, this can help a lot to reduce the work in your category mappings. After you set the default category, then you only have to change the categories for those products that don’t fall into that category.

That’s great for focused stores, but what to you do when you have a broader range of products. This is where the new store mappings will help. Let’s say you have three store categories; Radios, Baby Clothes and Golf Clubs. They certainly won’t fit into a single channel category. With the mappings you can pick a default category for each. Radios can have a default like “Electronics->Radios, Baby Clothes can go into something like Apparel->Babies and so forth. The categories I have used are just examples and don’t represent any real channel categories.

There is a lot of flexibility with this. You can set a global default category, then set a default category for one or more of you store categories and then categorize those products that don’t fall into one of the defaults. When you have hundreds or thousands of products, this can be a real time saver and make it a lot easier to add additional channels for your products.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 7:21 pm and is filed under FeedPerfect News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.