Solid Cactus Launches FeedPerfect–Free 30-day Trial

Brian Smith of SingleFeed recently authored a two-part article on shopping comparison engines, how merchants can work with them and get started using them. The following post comes from Scott Sanfilippo, co-founder and President of Solid Cactus, about a recent product introduction aimed at making shopping comparison engines a valuable channel for small businesses.–Paul

As e-commerce grows, many consumers are choosing to shop through merchant product aggregators, known as Shopping Comparison Engines (SCEs) like Shopping.com, Shopzilla, Yahoo! Shopping, etc. SCEs help consumers more easily identify items and more conveniently compare pricing between merchants.This is a growing market. Forrester Research estimates SCE revenues are expected to reach $54.3 billion in 2007, or a whopping 27% of e-commerce sales. If that’s not a push to get your products into the SCEs, I don’t know what is.

The key to a successful SCE campaign is careful monitoring. Since most are pay-per-click, the problem arises when you see a bill at the end of the month, telling you that you lost money on an SCE. Was that because they shopped but didn’t buy anything, or was the campaign unprofitable because of a few non-performing items? The answers to these questions can make or break your future on an SCE, and those answers are difficult to find.

The challenge

Having run a successful e-commerce store for 13 years, I was keenly aware of how much money was spent on SCEs and how important they were to our sales. I also knew it was important to have visibility into that monthly bill to see if a particular SCE or even a particular product was a loser. But I didn’t want to pay upwards of $1,000 per month and an additional percentage of sales to get that visibility. There had to be a better way.

The solution

Our advanced programming department at Solid Cactus was charged with the task of creating an application that not only showed how much money was spent, lost and made in the SCEs, but also “fed” products to them and was affordable. After 18 months, the result is what we have today, Feed Perfect.
For feeding, Feed Perfect has the categorization method and data requirements for each SCE built into the application. All you need to do is map the fields from your store to our global fields. When it comes to categorization there is no guess work. You select the SCE you’re categorizing products for and Feed Perfect will show you what is available.

Dashboard view of FeedPerfect where merchants can view account and channel alerts, graphs for the various channels, and which products are performing well or poorly.

Once your products are in the SCEs, Feed Perfect’s robust reporting engine will provide you with pre-defined reports to give you product level ROI based reports that you can take action on. The best part… you can see what products aren’t performing and exclude them from the feed in just a few clicks of a mouse.

Since its launch on March 1st, customers are already saving hundreds of dollars a month. The cost for Feed Perfect is at least eighty percent less than competing products and has just as many bells, whistles and analytical expertise that the more expensive packages offer.

Feed Perfect takes only a few minutes to setup and it fully integrates with your Yahoo! Store. And to show you how much money you can save, we’re offering all new sign-ups a free 30-day trial. So go ahead, log onto http://www.feedperfect.com, and setup your account and start “feeding.” If you run into problems along the way, we offer free technical support. If you want more information on Feed Perfect, we’re offering free informational webinars. A complete schedule can be found at http://events.solidcactus.com.

Scott Sanfilippo
Guest blogger forYahoo! Small Business