There are several fields in FeedPerfect that can greatly increase the relevancy of your products within a channel search. These fields are UPC, MPN and ISBN. Many of the channels support these fields, and highly suggest populating the fields if relevant to the product.

As a quick refresher:

MPN or Manufacturer Part Number, is the unique part number or code for an item determined by the manufacturer for that product.

UPC or Universal Product Code, is a unique numerical identifier for commercial products, usually associated with a bar-code printed on retail merchandise. It is a numeric field with a length of 8, 12, 13 or 14 digits.

ISBN or International Standard Book Number, is a unique numerical identifier for all commercial books. You can find your book’s ISBN on the back of the book along with a bar-code. All books manufactured since 1970 should have an ISBN. It is a numeric field with a length of 10 or 13 digits. There are optional formats that include ‘-‘s in the field.

Why do I need to use these fields?

Including these fields is important for all channels that support these fields, especially for channels, such as Google, which does not allow you to categorize your products. A product may or may not have one of these fields available. For the products which do not have an actual UPC code, you will want to leave the field blank. You do not want to simply add in a value which you had created yourself; this will not improve your relevancy but may instead have a negative impact on the relevancy of your product listing.

Including these fields improves the channels ability to match customer search requests against products. Including this information can also increase the products relevancy based on the search request.

Here’s what Google recently had to say about these fields:

“We recently added UPC, MPN and ISBN to the list of required attributes for bulk uploads of the Products item type. Providing this information will help us rank items better and allow us to deliver more relevant results to our users. Starting today, we’re asking everyone submitting items to Google Base US whose items are in the category of products and use these unique identifiers to begin including them for their items. As we will be using this information to categorize your items, please take particular care in the values you provide for these attributes. Only universally-recognized values should be included for these three attributes. Not including accurate values for these fields can have a negative effect on the ranking of your items.”

Information is power. By providing as much relevant product information you have available to the Comparison Shopping Engines will help increase your products chances of being displayed during a relevant search.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 10:00 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.