Shopping Engines: GoMage Feed Pro Available for Magento 2

Sell downloadable products in your store, assign unlimited product attributes and even moderate product tags and reviews to maintain full control over your own website. You can also connect with various sales channels such as eBay and Amazon. What is good about Magento integration is that all your products are synchronized with the site. Thus, your customers will not buy goods that are out of stock.

Millions of target customers are searching for attractive prices on different products on Google Shopping, Amazon, eBay, Nextag, Shopzilla and others every day. This provides a huge number of possibilities for online merchants but, on the other hand, strong competition creates certain threats.

If you list your products on a shopping engine, you may have immediate results. The product may be sold in a few minutes after it has been published. But you still run some risks because you must pay for each click or the number of impressions. Here we want to review some channels and their features that you should consider.

Why shopping engines are so popular with online users

Online shopping gives a lot of benefits for both merchants and users. But why do users choose to use a shopping engine? Here are some reasons:

• Convenience: Customers can shop at any time and receive the latest information. To be successful in sales, merchants must monitor and update the product information on these sites.
• Comparison: A shopping engine consolidates thousands of offers by different sellers, which is very convenient for customers. The ability to compare prices of different merchants is only one of the important advantages. Customers can compare reviews, the duration of presence on the platform, product range, quality of content, and so on.
• Wide choice and great probability to catch a good offer: Typically, there is a high level of competition on such websites which also creates advantages for visitors. In the battle for customers, merchants are forced to offer more attractive prices.
• Real reviews: This is a very important point. Customers must be sure that these are real customer reviews. And those merchants who have a positive rating are more likely to attract other online shoppers.

What are comparison shopping engines (CSEs)?

Comparison shopping engines (CSEs, price comparison websites, comparison shopping websites) are special websites where online marketers can display their goods side by side next to other retailers’ products. While shopping, customers can browse a CSEs database of goods, each of which links back to an individual marketer’s website for the deal to take place. Negotiants advertise their products by sending the CSEs a shopping feed, also known as product or data feed, which contains their products’ information.

The comparison shopping engines is really worth your time if you are an established marketer.
If you have a product mix of more than 400 and do more than $1 million in yearly revenue, CSEs are absolutely worth your time to at least consider as an additional source of income. CSE campaigns make up anywhere from 5-50% of our clients’ total online revenue.

Magento Google Shopping Feed Extension

Google Shopping Feed for Magento has been specially created to amplify your online store. It allows a user to set up an entire shopping feed in an easy way – without any lapses, saving your time. With your commodities available in a Google store, you will get a great number of potential customers. The goods or services which you offer can be quickly imported to your Google merchant account to this add-on. To miss different errors, the software checks or supplies all the necessary data and information for your Google Merchant account, to make sure that there are no omissions or unprofessionally-looking results in your data feed. Choosing feed categories from the large Google taxonomy is not always simple when done manually; it can be difficult and time-consuming to choose and repeatedly select correctly. With this add-on, everything is simpler. The extension supports all product types, even configurable and grouped products.

Most comparison shopping engines have the same principles of work: you need to create and upload Comma-Separated-Value file (CSV) or XML file to the site feed, and after this, your items will be displayed to users. It is very important to specify the necessary product information, such as:

• SKU – a product code
• Name – a product name
• Description – a product text description
• Category – product category where you’d like to display your product (For example; clothes > MEN > T-shirts)
• Price
• Product URL
• Different engines have their own specific features and requirements to the data feed file you need to create. Sometimes it is not so easy to do.

Data Feed Magento Extension

For Magento online store owners, GoMage company provides a special Feed Manager extension which is now available for Magento 2 version. GoMage Feed Pro for Magento 2 has been released recently and this extension has a lot of important improvements to offer.

GoMage Feed Pro for Magento 2 extension allows you to expand your marketing channels by uploading your product data directly to all popular shopping engines, online marketplaces, and comparison shopping websites such as Google Shopping, Amazon, eBay, and many others. This is a special plugin that takes all necessary data about the products in your online store and generates a specially formatted file with that information. This file can be viewed in your browser, downloaded to your computer, and uploaded to your Merchant Center with the corresponding shopping system. GoMage Feed Pro for Magento 2 extension automates the feeding process and saves your time for new achievements.

In this new version, you can use your conditions to select products and generate them into your feed file. Each feed file can be edited, so you can change your criteria and update the data you want to list in the shopping engine.

• The time for the feed creation has been reduced significantly. The feed generation technique has been modified significantly to ensure a fast and stable generation process regardless of the quantity of products in your catalog. No matter whether you have 1,500 or 15,000 products – the feed generation takes no more than a few minutes.
• It is easier to work with the extension now because the new interface is more user-friendly. The FeedPro extension interface perfectly fits the view of the Magento 2 administrative panel. The steps of the feed configuration are clear and easy to use, making the configuration process simpler and faster, even for inexperienced users.
• Categories and Subcategories. Assign your products to the proper categories and subcategories to make sure that your feed file is accepted by the target shopping system and improve your conversion rates.
• Upload and Resize Images. The option to upload and resize the product images will help you to ensure that the images used in the feed match the requirements of the necessary shopping engines.
• There are lots of useful features, such as email notifications, auto-upload schedule, low memory server optimization and many others
• Characters Limit. Some shopping systems implement character number limits for product names, attributes, descriptions, etc. GoMage FeedPro settings allow you to set the corresponding limits for each feed file in order to meet the shopping systems’ requirements.
• Output Type Filters. Optimize your product listings to match the shopping systems’ requirements. Remove the HTML tags from the description, decode or encode special characters, delete spaces in product names, convert capitals into lowercase letters and so on.
• Improved Filtering Options. You can choose the attributes by which products will be included or excluded from the feed and set conditions as you like. New convenient and user-friendly filters help you to create the feed file quickly, easily and only with the necessary products.
• GoMage Feed Pro helps you to work with several engines and save your time on routine operations.

Once your data is placed and processed by the shopping engine, your products are displayed on their websites to a huge number of online users.

Configuration of product feed campaigns may take a lot of time and effort, which could instead be spent developing your business, traveling, or resting with your family. This problem has now been solved. GoMage Feed Pro: Feed Manager for Magento 2 is a special plugin that takes all necessary data about the products in your online store and generates a specially formatted file with that information. The Feed Manager can also be configured to automatically upload the feed file to the server of the shopping system, online marketplace or comparison shopping websites such as Google Shopping, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Buy.com, Sears.com, Nextag, PriceGrabber, and many others. GoMage Feed Pro extension for Magento 2 automates the feeding process and saves your time for new achievements.

A lot of shopping engines use Pay-to-Play models. When a user clicks on your product, they are sent to your online store and you are charged for this user activity. There is clearly no guarantee that the user will make a purchase, so you must calculate how much money you are ready to spend on this channel in advance.

Powerful Insights in GoMage Feed Pro M2

• Generation and Upload Schedule.
  You may schedule automatic feed generations and upload these to shopping engines if you need them to be renewed on a regular basis.
• System Notifications
  Use this feature to receive email notifications whenever the feeds are successfully generated and uploaded, or when the process fails due to an error.
• Unlimited Feeds
  Create as many feed files as you need. Flexible filtering options allow you to generate separate feeds depending on categories, prices, product types, size, color, and other product attributes. There are no limits for perfection.

To find out which shopping engine to choose, consider the following statistics.

As you see, Amazon is the leader among the websites where people prefer to shop in the USA. It is interesting that until quite recently there were 2 main programs on Amazon:

• Amazon Marketplace
• Amazon Product Ads

But in December 2015, Amazon stopped the Product Ads program even though it was very popular with merchants and convenient for online shoppers. The decision was based on Google’s entry into this market as it won a strong position in Product Listing Ads.

Let’s review some other players in this market.
The lower Alexa Traffic Rank is, the better it is for the site.
Using Alexa Traffic Rank, you can analyze the traffic of each site and predict the number of users you can attract. If you search on Google, you will find a lot of articles describing the pros and cons of different shopping engines. Most likely, you will come across the fact that there are different opinions about which one is better.

There is no single answer to the question of which shopping engine you should choose as it depends on too many factors. Some websites will work better for the types of products that you sell over others.

For example, if one shopping engine presents many products of your competitors, this may be a sign that there’s a lot of potential customers available on that platform. But you have to compete and it is not an easy process. Therefore, you may want to consider another website where the competition is lower.

You should use all opportunities and check all the possibilities to find the answer that works best for the growth of your company.