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.

On June 30th, Google Product Search will make some minor changes to the feed format it requires.  If you are currently using Google Product Search, you recently received an e-mail detailing the changes to come. You will not need to alter any data for June 30th, though you will be able to take advantage of the new “compatible with” attribute.

The “condition” attribute will become required. The “condition” has always been required in FeedPerfect for optimal results. By default, the attribute is set to “new”.

The “product type” attribute will change to recommended. The “product type” attribute was previously required. It will be made recommended in FeedPerfect on June 30th, but no changes will be necessary from our users’ end.

Finally, Google Product Search is introducing a new “compatible with” attribute available June 30th.
The new “compatible with” allows you to specify what products your item is compatible with.  For instance, if you’re listing an HP 74 (CB335WN) black ink cartridge, you can use this attribute to tell us that it’s compatible with the HP Photosmart C4480 and HP Photosmart C4580 printers.  Using this attribute will help you avoid listing the same item multiple times with different compatibility information. For more information, please visit

http://base.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=73932#optional

From Become.com:

Valued Partner,

Time is almost out to take part in Become.com’s free promo text offer in June*!

This offer is available only to merchants who install the ROI tracker during the month of May, so grab the code from the Become.com merchant dashboard and get it installed today!

What is it?

Become.com’s ROI tracker is a campaign optimizing tool we offer free of charge to our retailers to help them achieve the BEST performance on Become.com. The code will only track sales generated by Become.com.

Why should I use it?

This data helps us know if you convert best on X products over Y and make informed suggestions and campaign improvements together based on this feedback. It is also a great tool to review performance on Become.com–on a category or overall basis. In a tough economy your performance goals are more important than ever, and greater visibility into your Become.com campaign will help us work with you to optimize and rev up to meet your requirements!

Account data will be visible to the specific account only. We do not share this data with competitors or partners.

What kind of information does it track?

Become.com’s ROI tracker tracks sales generated by Become.com clicks (30 day cookie credit). When a buyer reaches the confirmation page, the code will automatically send the necessary information back to our reporting. We do not retrieve sensitive data or sales made from other sources.

What is PromoText?

PromoText allows you to add customized messaging to your product listings on Become.com, alerting online shoppers to specials deals and discounts on your site (ex: ‘Free Shipping!’). You can find more information on PromoText here.

To qualify for the promotion, please install the ROI tracker this month and contact your account manager or email merchanthelp@become.com.

Best,

The Become.com Team

* PromoText charges will be credited back to the account dashboard at the end of the month

Shopping.com is excited to announce 2 new pricing programs, beginning May 15th, that will enable you to add low priced inventory and advertise your brand to millions. This is another step to sustain your cost of sales and profitability.

1. Introducing Tiered CPC Pricing – We are introducing a tiered pricing model where the CPC rates will be based on the product price in all categories.This innovative pricing model enables you to advertise low priced items and match consumer demand, while maintaining profit. We recognize some tiers will see an increase nevertheless the methodology we used to develop the tiered pricing model is based on meeting a sustainable cost of sale.
   

   Click here to view the new rate card.

2. Launching Tiered Logo Pricing – Shopping.com is making brand advertising more affordable by changing the logo rate from a flat $0.10 CPC to a tiered cost structure based on the item price. The new rates allow you to economically advertise your brand in front of millions of consumers. These new rates should not exceed 25% of your overall spend.

Additionally, we recently completed the full roll-out of our international click filtering program. You will continue to receive international traffic but Shopping.com will not charge you for these clicks, ultimately improving your campaign’s conversion to sale.

Learn more on how to take advantage of these new prices and features.

For a limited time, Priceleap.com is offering unlimited clicks on unlimited items for a flat monthly fee for the the life of an account when you sign up for a $39.95/month plan or for ten bucks more you can have your logo displayed as well (100×30 pixels and no more than 2k in size).

Here’s a link:
http://priceleap.com/signup_pl/signuppl.htm

You might also want to check out their priceleap merchant agreement

Basically, you just sign up, activate the feed and set it up in Feed Perfect like any other CSE. When you push your first feed, it takes 3-5 days to process the first time and typically 24-48 hours to go live any time you update your feed after that.

Happy Feeding!