Google not only ignores the two fledgling industry standards for data feeds, but like a bull in a china shop, goes all futuristic by extending the attribute list for products. The base attributes of the a Google bulk submission file are

1. brand
2. condition
3. description
4. expiration_date
5. id
6. image_link
7. link
8. price
9. product_type
10. title

A standard list which complies with the basics of the ARTS data feed standard and the upcoming Oasis new data feed trading standard.

But a few weeks ago, Google extended the optional list of attributes, stating that

....If you are submitting one of the following item types, you can increase your items' exposure in search results by including additional attributes as well...

Most product category attributes have been extended to cover color, styling, and size. For instance, the clothing category the extra attributes for a product are

1. color
2. department
3. made_in
4. material
5. size
6. style

1. color
2. film_type
3. focus_type
4. megapixels
5. model_number
6. resolution
7. size
8. tech_spec_link
9. upc
10. zoom

1. color
2. department
3. heel_height
4. made_in
5. material
6. shoe_width
7. size
8. style

The intension is to provide a more sophisticated search. Rather than 3D virtual world display of garments, it is aiming at what Google does best, crunch and search data.

The question is whether online merchants can be equal partners in this futuristic vision. It is a heavy burden on a merchant's IT team to help Google "Access all the World's Data". The incentive for merchants is there though; as Google integrates its shopping search into its main search results, the amount of traffic directed to merchants will be huge.

The stakes in data feed marketing just got higher. At Enclick, we have been putting together a central database of products with attributes and data collated from various sources. We use the central database to complete the missing attributes on our customer data feeds. Google has just raised the level of data we need to collate for all products lines.

Technorati Tags: data+feed+marketing , data+standards , retail+association , shopping+standards

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 1:29 PM | Permalink: Google Data Feed Standard Goes Futuristic

The Association of Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) has issued its first proposal for a data feeds standards. The standard is aimed squarely at Comparison Shopping Engines, like shopping.com, kelkoo.com and enclick.com. The goal of the standard is to allow ecommerce merchants to generate a single data feed valid for all affiliate networks and shopping sites, instead of the dozen odd data feeds which are necessary at present.

Jay Heavilon of MARS, who chairs the committee for the standard states

"The current situation is a digital tower-of-Babel, where different online shopping search and shopping engines take SKU data in different formats. These specs allow advertisers, engines, and agencies to exchange product data more efficiently,”

[National Retail Federation Press Release]

Google, W3C and ARTs have competing standards for ecommece data feeds. Google has published the GData API which is a simple focused standard, concentrating exclusively on getting merchant's products into Google Base. With Google Checkout interface adding the transaction backend interface.

The ARTS standards is a more comprehensive definition of vocabulary which ties into ART's other standards for the communication along entire retail value chain. The W3C's RDF schema is also comprehensive, but the retail category XML schema is still not complete.

There Can be Only One

The three data feed standards clearly overlap in scope. Which ones attains critical mass first is still very much an open question. Each standard has pros and cons.

ARTS has buy-in from Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft, and other major players in the online retail sector.

Google Data is now the way for merchants to get their products into Google Search Results. Since Google dominates the retail clickthrough market; its search is typically the origin of 25% of all ecommerce related clickthrough. If Google keeps this lock on retail related traffic, Google Data will be an obligatory data feed for all online shops.

The W3C's XML standards have the advantage of having public domain licences. W3C waives the right to demand fees for the use of its schemas. ARTS and Google reserve all rights on the use of their standard; either organization has a right to demand fees and royalties on the use of their standard in the future. All W3C's standards use forms of creative commons licences, and are therefore truely for the benefit of the retail community.

Public Licence Standards

The public licence issue over the standard is central here. Viral marketing tenets for mass adoption recommend zero fees and minimum friction on use of the schemas. But Already Google has attracted strong criticism from internet leaders over their commercial lock-in tactics of the Google Data standard. Similarly, ARTS already levies fees for use of some of their standard; a disaster in viral marketing terms.

Meanwhile retail merchants observe in hope, as they are forced to produce half a dozen feeds for submitting their product list to price comparison engines.

Technorati Tags: data+standards , retail+association , shopping+standards

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 4:40 PM | Permalink: Shopping Feeds Standards Fight is On

The announcement comes just in time, as Google hurtles forward in the development of its competing GData standard for Google Base and Google Checkout. Google Base is to power comparison shopping on Google's main search, with Google Checkout providing clients and merchants with bank clearing of transactions.

[Google Data API have opened a blog here]

Technorati Tags: comparison+shopping , gdata , google+base , online+retail , shopping+data+feed+standard

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 9:11 AM | Permalink: Developments on the Standard Universal Data Feeds Front

Order the defendant to withdraw the articles, photographs and graphic representations of Belgian publishers of the French - and German-speaking daily press, represented by the plaintiff, from all their sites (Google News and "cache" Google or any other name within 10 days of the notification of the intervening order, under penalty of a daily fine of 1,000,000.- € per day of delay;

The court clearly does not understand that

• the online newspapers are liberally rewarded with a huge influx of traffic from Google
• small quotes appearing on Google are great PR and marketing for the newspapers
• the material published is a very small fraction of the material in each article

The belgium court in question is clearly a copyright and trademark stalwart, not even allowing for a small quotation of the copyright material. Quite the opposite of the open source business model.

Google CEO, Eric Schmidt thinks the conflict should have remained as business negotiation between Google and each newspaper.

Because of our scale and because of the amounts of money that we have, Google has to be more careful with respect to launching products that may violate other people's notion of their rights. But also, frankly, we find ourselves in litigation and the litigation was expensive, and diverts the management team, etcetera, from our mission. In the cases that you describe, most of the litigation in my judgment was really a business negotiation being done in a courtroom. And I hate to say that, but that is my personal opinion. And in most cases a change in our policy or a financial change would in fact address many of the issues.

Danny Sullivan offers the best coverage of the case, with interviews with the two parties.

It remains to be seen whether the papers are actually advantaged by being excluded from the Google search engine, which dominates European internet traffic. After all the "fair-use terms" of copyright material were designed into the law for the benefit of both authors and the community.

Technorati Tags: copyright , google+belgium

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 9:47 AM | Permalink: Ridiculous Court Ruling Against Google on Fair Use of Copyright Material

The Open Document movement, from the OASIS industry consortium, is slowly but surely wresting Microsoft's market dominance in word and spreadsheet applications. The Oasis consortium is formed by government and public institutions around the world, as well as software vendors that commit to public licenses. Governments all over the world are starting to demand a common open standard for their documents, such that they are no longer limited to using Microsoft's Word and Excel applications. The idea is that documents are stored in an open public domain format, such that anybody can write a program to process the document; all software vendors can compete in providing a word and spreadsheet applications.

Best of all, the open source openoffice.org suite of office applications, are free to use. The office suite includes word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, vector drawing, and database components. It is available for any platform, including Linux and Microsoft.

The commonwealth of Massachusetts leads the push to make an open document format obligatory. WIth so much pressure Microsoft has had to respond and open its proprietary binary document formats. The first step has been to set up its own XML-based file formats, and granting a conditional public license for its use; its Office Open-XML standard. The downside of the standard is that it is taylored only Microsoft Office Suite, in addition to a license prohibiting some competitors from using it.

In the most recent breakthrough, Microsoft has ceded to pressure and Microsoft's office will support the Open Document Format (ODF). Thus Microsoft Office documents will be open to other applications, like the free openoffice.org free editors and spreadsheet software, opening Microsoft up to huge market pressure.

Open Document Standard Fight Continues

The development of the document standards has been accompanied by strong debate. One the one hand figureheads from Microsoft, like Brian Jones, who is a leading player in the Microsoft Office team, and developers at IBM and SUN who are part of the Oasis and openoffice partners.

In spite of the continuing debate over the pros and cons of the two standards, the fact is that Microsoft is having to embrace a public domain format based on the XML, which is the bedrock for the long term commons vision of the web.

[Related entries

• Google Skirmishes with W3C over Data Source Standards
• Data Feed Standards Conflict Looming Between Competing Price Comparator Portals


• Shopping portal data standards

Technorati Tags: open data , open document standard , open xml

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 1:56 PM | Permalink: Microsoft Loosing its Lock on the Office Software Market

Comparison Shopping Market Leaders

Rank Name Domain Market Share

1 www.shopping.com 18.38%
2 www.bizrate.com 17.35%
3 shopping.yahoo.com 14.39%
4 www.shopzilla.com 13.60%
5 www.froogle.com 8.49%
6 www.nextag.com 7.83%
7 www.pricegrabber.com 5.81%
8 www.epinions.com 5.75%
9 www.calibex.com 4.63%
10 eshop.msn.com 3.76%

From Search Engine Watch

Kelkoo dominates the U.K market, with more than double the traffic of #2 player Shopping.com UK

These are the players that most affect the shopping feed standards body. The shopping feed standards they require from merchants are quite different both in language, format and parameters.

Technorati Tags: comparison+shopping , ecommerce , vertical+search

Posted by Paul Salber at 8:01 AM | Permalink: Shopping Feed Standards: Governing Body

Industry bodies are trying to push through a standard for shopping feed files A recent meeting of the Arts trade association feed standards committe had a low turnout from shopping engines.

One of the big problems with shopping feeds is the wide range of different taxonomies, categories that merchants and shopping engines use to categorize merchandise in their offering. The forms that merchants must fill out to send their product data to the engines also differ widely, increasing the chance of error and the work that marketers must perform to get items listed. For example, Yahoo! Shopping has two mandatory fields, 13 optional ones and 40 possible setting combinations for each SKU; Shopping.com has one mandatory field of 21 characters with three options; and Shop.com has four fields of 255 characters each. Other metadata can also be handled differently from engine to engine—things like global shipping and payment settings, feed file requirements, and submission data.

Standards would reduce the overheads in generating shopping feeds for the ecommerce merchants, improve the return on investment for marketing on shopping engines.

One issue that came up in a recent shopping portal representative was whether to require merchants to offer their data feeds in extensible markup language (XML), a text format originally developed for large-scale electronic publishing. Many merchants now send their feeds in the form of highlighted spread sheets and data streams delimited by commas—an old holdover that’s relatively easy to program, but also likely to contain undetected errors that can get their product data left out of a shopping engine index. The concensus is that XML is the future, but uptake is slow among some older shopping portals.

The advantage of better shoping feed standards is the ability to use richer data. The ecommerce retailers want to provide it and the shopping engines want to use to on their portal. Standadized XML shopping feeds will arrive in the future.

Technorati Tags: ecommerce , shopping , xml

Posted by Paul Salber at 8:00 AM | Permalink: Standardisation of shopping engine feeds meets with problems | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)