Shopping.com to Update Products in 30 Minutes or Your Pizza's Free*
Related Anecdote
A few weeks ago a CPC Strategy colleague went into Office Max to try to take a look at the then unreleased Toshiba Thrive tablet; he played around with it for a while and decided that he wanted to purchase it.
However when a cashier tried to ring it up there was a message that said that it was” not to be sold.”
Confused, the cashier brought in a manager, and 20 frustrating minutes later our colleague was told he couldn’t purchase it as it wasn’t authorized to be sold at the time.
He then left the store frustrated, tablet-less and his heart sunken.
The Problem
In the online world the equivalency of such an experience is to find a product through a CSE at the right price, only to click through and find the product advertised at a completely different price, or worse yet, out-of-stock.
This is an issue for many merchants have while listing on the CSE’s–they don’t update their price/inventory levels enough to reflect their actual levels.
One Solution
And while Shopping.com doesn’t completely solve the problem with merchants not updating their feeds often enough, they’ve taken a big leap in helping out diligent merchants keep their listings as up-to-date as possible:
Shopping.com is pleased to announce a significant enhancement to our feed processing technology where feed updates made to price and stock availability will now be reflected on site within 30 minutes.
Expedited feed processing displays the most price accurate in-stock offers, creating an optimal consumer experience while improving conversion to sale.
Unfortunately like our misleading headline, the promise is not an actual guarantee, but more of a guideline that should apply to most merchants who try to update their feeds.
So if you’re a merchant with constantly changing inventory or prices, this acts as great news, particularly if you’re capable of keeping up feed-wise, thereby avoiding wasted clicks.
Hopefully this is one trend that other CSE’s can get onboard with as well.
On that note, to see how Shopping.com fared against other CSE’s in the past quarter, check out our newly released comparison shopping engine rankings.
*guarantee does not actually exist
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