I was wondering if anyone has used either of these sites to promote your products.

The idea is to build a marketplace on a similiar model for MC clients....

Anyfeedback good or bad is appreciated.

If you have used either of these services... can you please discuss the ease or difficulty of importing products into their systems?

Thanks!

I entertained the idea, but felt the rates to become a member were much too exorbitant, at least for a business of my size. I'd like to see more ideas about the Mall though.

Hi Captain

Yes I've used them and other similar sites, mainly Epinions which has now merged with Deal Time, sadly.

Our experience is that these sites work best for people sending brand products, or products that have very similar products across other brands, as people are looking for a comparison of quality and price. If your product can't be compared to another one then the channel fails as an effective marketing outlet.

Cheers

Chris

Chris,

Do you think we want to build a comparison shopping model... or a model for all MonsterCommerce clientstp post their products within an efficient and organized shopping outlet?

We have the skillsets to ensure the products get good listings in the engines form the site... so I think over time the site will get good traffic. But to be successful.. the model must be laid out in a way that provides value to the end user.

I believe Scorpio was the one that pointed out that there are 1000's of "malls". What should be implemented to add value for the end user?

I hate to share this because the more people who use it, the sooner the shopping mall people will discover the door they didn't close.

One day while messing around with tags, I thought what the heck and started entering a new tag

PRICE $1000.00 (or what ever it cost)

What do you know 10 weeks later, the items I tested started showing up on directbuy and a few others. I don't have accounts with them, rather their spiders are pulling from the price tag.

Most of the search engines as you know are changing how and what the tags will pull in index, for us----that little price tag has been a great black hole to jump through. Much like the URL tag in helping our customers see where the heck the link is moving them off to.

If your prices change very often, I don't suggest you trying this tag out though. That would be a mess!

Hi Captain,

As timbersnoni said you can end up on many of the comparison sites by accident as they spider for content or through affiliate programs with Bizrate and others.

Froogle is something that's interesting oand offers a different approach, at present Google aren't doing much with this site, no doubt they have some plans, but it's free and you can either wait to be spidered or do a data dump into their system.

Perhaps could hook up with Google to arrange a frequent dump of all store products into the Froogle System?

There are a lot of Mall sites around and the majority of the good ones are Affiliate Commission driven. Ones that are based around a software platform as the common factor seem to fail as the Software is not recognized by the users, only by Merchants. The only mall systems I know of that work well are Amazon, Yahoo and Ebay Stores, which in effect, offer a Mall of sites, but they succeed in doing this through their brand not through the common software factor.

So in a nutshell i think the best route forwards would be that partner with an existing system to feed our product data into them (froogle as it is free).

Cheers

Chris

I think that is a great idea... the goal is to have a feed for Froogle in the near future... I was thinking it would also be good to have a Marketplace on the side that would feed traffic to our clients... from your post I can't gather whether you think this is a good idea or not. Let me know your thoughts.

...it did get a tad convaluted...

In a nutshell

Froogle : Excellent

Marketplace : Would be great but I don't think it'll make any sales, so I wouldn't spend time on it

Froogle I imagine will eventually distribute their content/data too.

Cheers

Chris

Chris,

If we do launch a Marketplace we will create a format that is highly search engine optimized. If we can earn high rankings for product names and ID's I think it will drive traffic and push sales. If we don't get a high ranking I agree it will be a failure. Something tells me can get the rankings neccessary for success.

Hi Captain

Yes that would certainly make all the difference. No harm in following both approaches, I know I'd love to have my products fed to Froogle every month

Cheers

Chris

Froogle feed is important to us and for MC clients. We will be working on integrating that into 4.0.

Hello All!

If someone interesting in tools for preparing Froogle data feed (first program will transfer your existing products & category table to Froogle data feed format; second allow you to manage build data feed file) for MC shopping cart version 3.x contact me at: zam@parks.lv

With best regards,