Pros/Cons of third-party feed submission vs. entire store export to Y!Shopping

[kick2fix]

Hey gang =)

Listen up all you Yahoo! Store merchants!!! If you're considering submitting a product file to Yahoo! Shopping using third-party software like FeedPerfect you may want to consider the following:

Yahoo! merchants enjoy a 20% discount for the cost-per-click fees that accrue when they list their entire store on Yahoo! Shopping. It's one of those benefits that at face value seems like a bargain given the volume of traffic that visits this portal on a daily basis. One would assume that the more traffic a portal has the better their chances are of generating landings for your items. More landings = more conversions (eventually )

Here's the problem: If you are getting a lot of clicks on Yahoo! Shopping but not so many conversions, that 20% discount is basically a discount on "dead clicks." For all of you FeedPerfect clients we call that a "Loser" and it appears as an alert in our "Dashboard" section of the "Channel" tab. If you are submitting your entire product file to Yahoo! Shopping there is no way of being alerted of a poorly performing product. What's more, to my knowledge there is no way to selectively exclude these "dead" products so as not to lose money. Chances are the item, for some reason, is not doing well and shouldn't be submitted if we're interested in maximizing ROI with our listing.

For Example:

I own a Yahoo! Store and I sell Seasonal Gift Baskets. With Easter in our midst we wouldn't want to be advertising a Halloween-themed basket or a Christmas basket. In order to save money, I would naturally want to list my Easter baskets but not the Halloween or Christmas baskets.

In this example, the Yahoo! merchant would have no choice but to submit all three items as long as they were included in the store's catalog.

FeedPerfect to the rescue!!!!!!

FeedPerfect (FP) allows users to selectively exclude products in order to conserve advertising costs associated with "dead click" CPC fees. After receiving a report that lists "Losers" in the Dashboard, users can click on those productIDs and view statistics acquired from FP tracking scripts to make educated decisions about product exclusion. So now when we know a product shouldn't be listed for obvious reasons we can remove them temporarily and not list them until we see fit to do so in the future. Every dollar you save puts you ahead of the game.

In my opinion, The tracking benefits and product inclusion/exclusion features that FeedPerfect offers trump Yahoo!'s generous 20% discount on your CPC cost both in the short and long-term. If you do decide to ditch the discount be advised that you cannot get it back.....ever. At least not for that particular store (as far as I can tell).

The choice is yours. Use The Force. hahaha

[erikko]

if you're uploading products in bulk, it will be beneficial but if it's about 20 items or less, it is still advisable to upload it manually