Third-party online shopping feeds can give you access to new customer universes

By Matt Griffin and Catalog Success

The rise of the search engine as a marketing tool has brought with it a bevy of other online-selling opportunities.

Not least among these are the shopping feeds, Web sites that act as online aggregators of merchandise and that allow consumers to compare similar products online, then choose merchants to supply the items. Often shopping feeds are referred to as comparison shopping engines or Web co-ops. Notable examples include Google’s Froogle and Amazon (see “Five Feeds Examined,” below).