E-commerce: A Solution to the Comparison Shopping Engine Hassle

The beta test of the standard took place last week when engineers at Channel Intelligence used the format to submit product data for electronics retailer Circuit City to the AOL Shopping platform.

The format consists of three XML specifications. The first provides a common format for retailers to describe their products to CSEs. The second gives a common format for CSEs to acknowledge correct and incorrect rows in a retailer’s feed submission. The third provides a common format for CSEs to report cost data back to the retailer – daily clicks and costs at the URL level.