As many of us know most shopping engines raise their CPC bidding rates during the holiday season. Become has decided to do something a little bit different!

Check out this update from Become:



Valued Partner,
Become.com is proud to announce that we are not raising our rates for the 2009 holiday season!

We recognize the need for retailers to make the most of this busy shopping season, and are happy to offer our partners our tools and features in order to help you optimize your holiday campaign. We encourage you to familiarize yourself with our dashboard and offerings in order to positively impact your listings!
But that’s not all! Become.com has one more gift for our merchant partners…

…a reduced CPC bid for logo eligibility! For the month of November, merchants who have uploaded a logo in our merchant dashboard and bid at least 5 cents above the minimum CPC’s will have their logo displayed on Become.com*!

Take advantage of what Become.com has to offer you this holiday season, and let us know if you have any questions!

The Become.com Team

* Merchants already taking advantage of the logo program at normal rates can adjust their bids manually for November; however, decreasing bids will impact your ranking.

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Matthew.Major@solidcactus.com

On Saturday, September 19th Solid Cactus will be performing server upgrades which will affect your Feed Perfect account. Feeds will still publish on the 19th and Feed Perfect will continue to track events behind the scenes. However, you will not be able to log into your Feed Perfect for up to 24 hours beginning on the 19th. These upgrades are routine, and are necessary to ensure the highest standard of performance for your account.

Please plan ahead to make any feed changes relevant for that weekend on Friday the 18th.

We appreciate your business and support.

Best Regards,
Feed Perfect Support Team

Dear Partner,

Become.com is proud to announce the upcoming release of its new and improved merchant dashboard! With its easy-to-use UI and faster response time, we are sure that the merchant dashboard will be well-received by our retailers, and we would like to offer you the opportunity to get a sneak peak before it launches.

Our sneak preview presentation breaks down the main functions of the dashboard for you prior to the September 14^th launch, in order to familiarize you with the sleeker look and feel of the interface.

When: The sneak peak webinar will occur in two sessions on September 11^th, at 11AM PST and 2PM PST.

How to register: Reply back to us (dani@become.com) and let us know which session you can attend; we will then send over your registration once we have all replies.

Pre-registration for this special demo ends at 12PM PST on August 31^st, so please contact us in order to take advantage of the preview webinar.

Best,

The Become.com Team

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posted by Matthew Major

matthew.major@solidcactus.com

Our FeedPerfect help site has been updated to include a step by step walk-through for submitting your feed to Google Base through FeedPerfect!!

Click HERE to visit our help site!

Click HERE to visit the walk-through!
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Matthew.Major@solidcactus.com

Dear Valued Customer,

NexTag, Inc. has updated the Merchant Lead Referral Terms of Service Agreement, (The “Agreement”) which governs your NexTag account. The link to the updated Agreement is provided below. Please click on the link to view the Agreement. It is important that you carefully review the terms and conditions of the Agreement as it will govern your NexTag account effective at 12:01 am on July 20, 2009 (“Effective Date”). If you do not wish to continue your account pursuant to the terms and conditions of the updated Agreement, you should delete all product and/or service listings and terminate your NexTag account prior to that time.

NexTag Terms of Service

If you have any questions or need assistance, contact sellersupport@nextag.com. Thank you for your cooperation, we appreciate your business at NexTag, Inc.

Best regards,
NexTag Team
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Matthew.Major@solidcactus.com

Valued Partner,

Optimizing your products to improve performance is vital in this competitive environment, and Become.com is ready to help! Our tip to you this week–keep up with your feed!

As the manager of your Become.com campaign, it’s important for you to be actively involved in order to ensure goals are met. Taking the pulse of your campaign can mean looking at several areas–here are some general areas of campaign health you may wish to check:

• Become.com Features: Some features, such as Percent Off, PromoText, and Hot Products, require certain areas of information to be populated in your feed. Make sure you keep updated on our features, and that your feed supplies as much product information as possible (Data Feed Specs).

• Products & Activity: Use Become.com’s SKU-based reporting and your own to review clicks to your products. Is a product receiving click volume but not producing enough sales? This may be a (runner) item that you can remove from your feed to improve your performance. Is a product selling well? You may want to bid up on that product specifically in your feed to boost visibility on our search results.

• ROI Tracking: Become.com offers a free ROI tracker to our merchants through the dashboard under Reporting > ROI Tracking Information. Merchants who have it installed can run reports to see overall and by-category health, as well as run SKU reports on sales. Consider installing this and running these reports in order to further optimize.

• Dashboard: Take some time to familiarize yourself with our account dashboard. Is all of the store information and contact information filled out correctly? Make sure you know how to pause and enable your account, and that your billing information is current.

Take a look at your feed and make sure it’s optimized today. Please feel free to reach out to your account manager or merchant@become.com with any questions, and look forward to more tips from Become.com!

Best,

The Become.com Team

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Matthew.Major@solidcactus.com

Dear Merchant,

Please be advised that NexTag will be performing a scheduled maintenance:

Friday, July 3, 2009 to Sunday, July 5, 2009

NexTag.com will still be available to all users. However, NexTag will not import any product feeds during the scheduled maintenance. You will still have access to your tools and reports in the merchant dashboard, apart from the ability to pause or edit individual products through the dashboard.

In order to have your latest changes live over the maintenance period, merchants are advised to upload their most current feed by Thursday, July 2, 2009 9:00 AM (PDT). Changes in feeds uploaded after 9:00 AM (PDT) will not be displayed on NexTag.com until the afternoon of Monday, July 6, 2009.

We apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate your patience during this scheduled maintenance.

Sincerely,

NexTag Seller Support Team.

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Matthew.Major@solidcactus.com

Pronto is excited to announce the launch of three unique new brands under the Pronto umbrella. On June 18th, ProntoHome.com, ProntoTech.com and ProntoStyle.com will be introduced to the over 14 million consumers shopping on Pronto.com today.

What does this mean to your Pronto Merchant Solutions program? Initially, the launch of these new brands is predominantly a change to the look and feel of existing categories on Pronto. The underlying search functionality and data will not be changing. As a result, you should not expect any material changes in your click volume or click quality. Over time, however, we hope that the more tailored consumer experience will significantly increase the qualified traffic Pronto drives to retailers like you.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact merchantsupport@pronto.com. Thank you for participating in the Pronto Merchant Solutions program. We look forward to continuing to work with you to make your program a huge success!

Thanks,
The Pronto Merchant Solutions Team

© 2009 Pronto Inc. All rights reserved

555 West 18th Street
New York, NY, 10011

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Matthew.Major@solidcactus.com

As noted in a previous post, Google Base will be making some changes to its required attributes on June 30th. While this won’t effect Yahoo! store – FeedPerfect users, it may be an issue for Legacy store users not on FeedPerfect.

If you are not yet using FeedPerfect and you have a Yahoo! Legacy store, please take a closer look. The now required “condition” attribute can cause some issues for you without the help of FeedPerfect.

Legacy stores do not have catalog manager, and therefore the merchant cannot easily add a new attribute like “condition”. In Legacy stores, only objinfo.xml is available for pulling catalog data. It does not include that field as of yet. So there is a chance Google Base will reject products that do not include the “condition” after June 30th.
What’s a Legacy store owner to do?

1. Upgrade in Yahoo! to Merchant Solutions.

2. Try FeedPerfect. FeedPerfect is designed to overcome these limitations and provide all Yahoo! store owners the ability to overcome the constant changes in feeds requirements. Legacy store owners can import their store, and use FP’s default condition to circumvent the limitation.

FeedPerfect is currently available with a 14 day free trial too.  Just visit FeedPerfect.com and ensure that you don’t lose visibility on Google Product Search any time soon.