Running an eCommerce store is not easy. You need to leverage any and all useful technology available to you and automate as many processes as possible in order to get the edge over your competitors.
One way of doing that is to use GoMage’s exceptional Feed Pro extension. Making it a must-have module for any Magento ® store!
Basically, if you’re serious about selling your products online – then you need to get them out there into as many marketplaces as possible, and that means you need to utilize shopping engines. Just as in the real world there are countless local marketplaces, the internet is no different. Simply having your online catalog as the only place your products are on display will not suffice in the ultra-competitive world of eCommerce.
This module allows you to enter precisely those other online marketplaces, known collectively as Shopping Engines, such as Google Shopping (previously Google Base), Nextag, PriceGrabber, amongst many, with the greatest of ease.
We often have over 3000-bed linen products in the catalog at any one time at online bedding store Just Bedding. Any attempt to manually handle such a file would be nobody’s idea of a good time and to deal with FTP credentials is a hassle.
When looking for a way to streamline and automate this requirement out of Magento ®, I could not find anything better than GoMage’s Feed Pro extension. It was easy to buy and install. Later, when we needed a second store license for leveraging Magento’s ® multi-store functionality for Cushion Room, the additional store license was well priced and simple to buy and activate.
Without a doubt, the first place you want to submit a product feed is Google Shopping. Compared to other shopping engines over the last three quarters of 2013, Google’s Product Listing Ads had generated the most traffic and revenue while maintaining the lowest cost of sale for ecommerce merchants out of all shopping engines. Some users report several thousand percent ROI. In general, click-through rates on ads with images are very high, and ROI is almost always impressive.
We’ve personally had great results. You can see here how we’ve done it with our quilt covers product category, which is the main category from the Just Bedding catalog. This category has new products added to it daily – and we need only to think of that since this extension for Magento ® then automatically updates the product feed file with these newly added products.
From your Magento ® admin, you can then find where this extension conveniently gives you the Access URL where a unique product feed can be found. It’s then as simple as taking this URL and updating each respective shopping engine admin configuration so that it knows where to extract the .csv or .xml file provided by Feed Pro. Remember to create a new feed for each additional shopping site, as some require specific mapping. This can be easily managed in your admin content setting and filter configuration found in Catalog > Feed > Manage Feeds.
We do this with no less than 5 different shopping engines. Scheduled to update at midnight each night. Now I just set it and almost leave it, as I can’t help but check out our product listings on those partnered shopping sites from time to time.
Written by Gabriel Luis.
