Product Data Feed Standards Sought

In a move to combat these dilemmas, merchants, search agencies and search engines met at Shop.org’s FirstLook 2006 in Atlanta in January to discuss the need for a common standard for describing merchandise via product data feeds on comparison shopping sites.

In the current system, each search engine has a slightly different set of data requirements for merchants who advertise products using the feeds. At the January meeting, merchants said that working with more than one engine meant presenting the same product data in varying formats. Meanwhile, search engine executives at the meeting said this practice often leads to faulty or imperfect data that require more work on their behalf to interpret, according to Rimm-Kaufman who organized the meeting. For their part, search agencies stressed the need for a common platform to receive machine-readable advertising reports from the engines.