subject: Submit Product Feeds for Your Ecommerce Site [print this page] Submit Product Feeds for Your Ecommerce Site
Product RSS feeds are data feeds of products that are sold through online retailers. These types of feeds are listed by both top search engines and product comparison search engines to generate more traffic for products that are sold on the internet. Everytime you create a listing for a new product to your e-commerce site or change the details of an existing product, search engines and product comparison engines will be notified of the change. Consumers searching for a specific product will be able to find your product on the web. Chances are they will make a decision to buy from your online store even though they have never visited your store before, this is all thanks to product RSS feeds.
Content rich sites typically rank very high in the top search engines, because they have a lot of information which lets the search engines determine what they have to offer and who their audience should be. E-commerce websites on the other hand are mostly filled with images, because a picture is worth a thousand words in terms of selling online. There is not a whole lot for search engines to go by so e-commerce web sites have a much harder time being found and indexed. When you submit product feeds, it makes it much easier to alert the search engines to crawl your product pages. In fact, they help to immediately alert the search engines that a new product is listed on your web site or if modifications were made to a product. Some search engines like Google even displays product images collected from the product feed on the first page of search results if the the user searches for a popular product name.
Product comparison engines also play a major role when it comes to helping to market your products online. Price comparison sites use this technology to connect the people searching for products to buy and the online stores that are selling them. It's a virtual product feed marketplace where consumers are actively searching for a product and the best price for that product, and online retailers are getting exposure to millions of online shoppers. There are a number of these websites on the web, some are completely free of charge and others are free to submit product feeds but require the online retailer to give up a percentage when a sale is made. These kinds of sites are called CPC price comparison sites. Their role is that of a major affiliate, getting paid a commission from thousands of e-commerce businesses. Here is a list of some of the top price comparison sites:
Yahoo Shopping
Google Product Search
Bizrate
Pricegrabber
Shopzilla
Shopping
There are some major advantages of using product feeds besides the obvious. Here are just a few reasons why you should submit product feeds:
Automatic updates of data feed
The audience you are targeting are consumers instead of web surfers that are just looking for information on the internet
Do some price comparison research of your direct competitors through price comparison sites
Some price comparison sites allow you to promote store discounts which will help you get even more traffic to your store
Consumers that come across your store by looking for one product will likely check out your other products
Conversion rates will likely go up, because it eliminates the unnecessary page views normally required to get to your product page
