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Making Your eBay Store Search-Savvy, Part One
By Beth Cox
June 30, 2004

Continued from Page One.

eBay's Help file on the process can be found here, but unfortunately, I found it distinctly unhelpful.

So, here I am with a nice URL for all our store listings, but I kind of need a search engine for a dance partner (better yet, a half-dozen) and there's no real good information on which search engines accept the file.

I tried Google's shopping search engine, Froogle, but their support for picking up eBay Store URLs is questionable. Their FAQ says they don't accept data feeds from affiliate marketing sites, and it's unclear what how they consider an eBay Store. (Google itself often picks up our store listings, however. When I searched for "paph" -- a kind of orchid -- one of our store listings was the 45th result.)

When I searched Froogle for our company name, I found bunches of our individual eBay auction and Buy It Now listings, but none of our Store listings. I learned long ago to put a link to our eBay store in each listing, so anyone who finds us via a listing that shows up on Froogle is really only two clicks away from our store.

The problem is, I want the customers who are searching for more generic terms, like "orchid" or "cattleya."

When I asked Froogle about eBay store feeds, a spokesman said only that "we don't provide specifics on the feeds of Froogle merchants."

You might think eBay would go the next step and offer a list of search engines that accept their store URL data feeds, but no. So I sent eBay customer support an e-mail, asking for a list of the search engines that accept the XML files.

I was pleasantly surprised to get a response in less than 24 hours. But I wasn't really happy with the answer, which amounted to a reiteration that it remains up to me to make arrangements with third-party partners.

"eBay is not responsible for coordinating how the file will be used with a third party," the e-mail read. "Unfortunately we do not have a list of product search engines that may use this."

I asked Chris Sherman, associate editor at SearchEngineWatch.com (in my opinion, it's the place to start if you want to learn more about search) for his take, and he said he's not sure which of the shopping search engines would accept the eBay data file.

"They all have their own formats and guidelines, so it's likely the eBay feed would have to be tailored for submission to another service," he said. "That said, some of the shopping engines will crawl XML files, so even though it's not a pure feed submission, content in an eBay file might get picked up by some of them."

You can find a list of major shopping search engines here, including links to BizRate, Shopping.com, DealTime, Yahoo! Shopping, Froogle, MSN Shopping, mySimon, NexTag, Kelkoo, PriceGrabber.com and others.

Clearly, this is a complex subject, and few people I talked with seemed to have good answers. Indeed, consensus among many knowledgeable online auction watchers was that the situation is pretty much uncharted territory.

Said one, "... as for eBay's XML file, I think it's not of any use to anyone, but was a diversion for eBay Store owners who wanted to submit to Froogle."

That said, eBay has at least responded publicly to concerns about utilizing the search engines. On recent post said eBay is beginning to experiment with submitting some Stores listings to Froogle and is encouraging individual eBayers "to follow up with them."

The last line of the post reads: "Thank you very much for your patience as we work through this!"

Part Two of this series will look at my experiences in attempting to get the search engines to accept our eBay Store XML feed. In the meantime, if you've been having some luck promoting your eBay store with Froogle or any of the other shopping search engines, please drop me an e-mail -- we'd love to be able to share your story.

Beth Cox is a contributor to eCommerce-Guide.com.

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