New Datafeed Marketplaces for Your eBay Retail Business

Talk about cost-effectiveness, it doesn’t get any better than this. If you can send a datafeed to an additional Web marketplace to create catalog entries, and if it doesn’t cost anything, this process is about as cost-effective as you can get. When the additional marketplace is Froogle, you can potentially increase your sales by a huge amount with nominal effort and expense. What a deal! This is something you can’t afford to overlook if you’re serious about your eBay retail business.

How it Works?
You already have data for your eBay auction listings and eBay Store listings. That data fills a webpage template with information and becomes the eBay auction ad or the eBay Store catalog webpage (ad). Why not use the same data for other online listings and catalogs such as Froogle or Yahoo Shopping? In fact, you can do this easily. Just take a subset (i.e ., a portion) of the data you already have and send it to the website (e.g., Froogle) where you want to sell your items. You export the data to the target website. Another way of saying this is that you provide a datafeed to the target website.

Froogle and Yahoo
Google is the leading search engine with a market share that’s over 50 percent. Yahoo runs a distant second with a market share that’s about 20 percent. Both Google and Yahoo have created strictly retail searches (search that return only products for sale. Google calls its special search Froogle. Yahoo calls its special search Yahoo Shopping. From your point of view, you can send a datafeed to each and expand your sales. Froogle is currently free. However, Yahoo Shopping charges for each click-through and can be expensive. Froogle is a huge opportunity for you. Clearly it’s the biggest and most cost-effective marketing and sales opportunity you have online in addition to eBay and eBay Stores. If you pass it up, you’re leaving money on the table. Go to http://www.google.com and click on the Froogle link and start your search, or go to http://www.froogle.com and search for an item you want to buy. Froogle will deliver a series of item listings to you, in effect a catalog. You simply decide where you want to buy, and one click will get you to the selling website. It’s simple and effective.

For a long time many people have been using Google to shop. Since it’s impossible to track sales through Google, no one knows how many sales are made through Google. My best guess is that the sales volume is equal to if not greater than eBay. Unfortunately, to sell effectively on Google, your website has to be found by the Google search engine. It may not be cost-effective for you. With Froogle, however, your website doesn’t have to get found. You provide a datafeed to Froogle, and your listings (items) will appear in the Froogle catalog (webpages). It’s simple, and it’s free. Froogle started its beta test in December of 2002. Yahoo copied it soon thereafter with Yahoo Product Search, which was in beta until the fall of 2003. Yahoo Product Search was free to retailers while in beta.

When Yahoo Product Search emerged from beta in September 2003 and started operation officially as a feature of Yahoo, it was renamed Yahoo Shopping. Yahoo then started charging retailers for listings with a substantial fee for every click-through on an item. Froogle completed beta in March of 2004 at which time it officially became a feature of Google. Froogle is still free for retailers, even though it’s not in beta any longer. Although still in its infancy, Froogle is destined to grow in popularity comparable to its parent Google. So long as it’s free, it’s a great opportunity for cost-effective retail sales.