Most notably, StoreSense 5.7, which shipped to resellers earlier in the month and is being deployed to end-users this week, adds the ability for sellers to upload their product catalogs to shopping comparison sites BizRate.com, Shopping.com and Froogle.

Using the feature, online merchants can get their foot in the door of three of the most popular engines, with relatively little effort and the same StoreSense interface that they're already using to manage their store.

"We make it easy to sign up and to post," said Michael Miller, a member of Kurant's sales team. Merchants "don't need to create an export file and zip it up and posting it to some site somewhere."

"The assumption is that the merchant will have built their store and input all their product data before they sign up to posting to a shopping search engine," he added. "When they do go post, we would pull all that product data from that store ... The more product data they input, obviously the better the listing."

To support the new feature, StoreSense 5.7 added new fields added to merchants' product information. Now, the system enables sellers to enter product data including ISBN, MPN, UPC, and "Condition" fields -- data commonly supported by the shopping search engines. Adding such product data also helps shoppers better use those search engines to pinpoint the products they're seeking.

Still, the integration between StoreSense and the shopping engines is limited to uploading products. Managing listings, cost-per-click rates, and other options still has to be handled manually on each site.

"Through the store we don't manage how much the merchant agrees to pay -- the merchant manages that at the search engine site," Miller said. And when it comes to maintaining which products are included in the search engines, and which aren't, "merchants find value in sending everything down and then seeing what sells, and then taking away products later, at the search engine level."

Future editions might include the ability to manage listings from within StoreSense -- but that would require serious technical additions on the search engines' side to allow for the feature to be extended to third parties like StoreSense.

"Today, it's not just possible on this side," Miller said.

Payment enhancements
The StoreSense 5.7 upgrade also adds new payment functionality. One of the changes allows merchants to offer PayPal as a payment option without actually having a PayPal account themselves -- which could provide for more flexibility for both sellers and buyers.

"I think there's many merchants out there that aren't really familiar with PayPal as a form of payment for a store," Miller said. "A lot of folks have thought of PayPal as a form of auction payment or a [person-to-person] or auction payment. This will enable those merchants to go 'Oh yeah, I can do this too, and have it as a great form of payment.'"

Added Kurant Chief Executive Curtis Pierce, "It's like PayPal on spec. When someone takes [a merchant] up on it, [StoreSense] can create an account on the fly and accept payment, so the customer sees it as they always had PayPal -- even though they hadn't initially."

The 5.7 release also adds support for Concord EFSNet and PayFuse payment gateways, and, more importantly, support for payment via electronic checks, using ElectraCash.

"On the merchant storefront, electronic check will be available just like Visa, PayPal, etc.," Miller said. "Buyers will be asked for their bank routing number and account number ... and StoreSense will do all of the processing behind the scenes. The merchant will be told, 'Yeah, this is good,' or, 'I'm sorry, this transaction was denied because that shopper didn't have funds available.'"

The addition is a plus for some merchants, since electronic checks or automated deductions are natural fits with subscription offerings.

"Merchants that do recurring billing, like subscription, tend to select checks or [automated clearinghouse] more frequently," Miller said. "Shoppers like to have it taken straight out of their checking account."

Overall, the addition of new payment methods and gateways could be good for sellers -- adding ways for shoppers to pay has been shown in recent studies to boost revenue.

Christopher Saunders is managing editor of eCommerce-Guide.com.

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