There are dozens of other datafeed marketplaces on the Web other than Froogle and Yahoo Shopping. On one hand, you can expect a big consolidation among the existing datafeed marketplaces. On the other hand, you can expect new datafeed marketplaces to pop up all over the place. Datafeed marketplaces are the latest killer ap in ecommerce. If you’re going to take advantage of datafeed marketplaces, you’ll have to have software that will create the proper datafeeds. It would be nice if the datafeed requirements of other datafeed marketplaces were identical to Froogle. Then you could use the Froogle datafeed to put your products on the product catalog webpages of the other datafeed marketplaces quite easily. There will always be marketplaces that want to do things differently, though, and it would be nice to have the capability to create a datafeed that meets a variety of requirements.

You might ask yourself, Why would I want to bother with other datafeed marketplaces when Froogle is likely to expand my sales significantly more than any other marketplace? The answer is that every little bit helps. So long as every little bit doesn’t cost too much money and it doesn’t take much of your time or effort, it might be cost-effective and rewarding to expand into these other marketplaces.

This is true particularly when the marketplaces you want to use are specialty marketplaces. For instance, suppose you sell chess games, chess pieces, and chess paraphernalia. If someone creates a specialty datafeed marketplace for family games, that should prove to be an excellent place for you to sell chess sets. Therefore, you would want to send a datafeed to get into this specialty marketplace. If the datafeed required is different than Froogle, you’ll have to create extra columns (fields) to enter the requisite data that goes into the product catalog entries for this particular marketplace. Your software will also have to have the capability to actually create and do a datafeed easily and quickly without any advanced high-tech knowledge and certainly without any knowledge of computer programming. Consequently, this is a feature to look for when you chose an auction management service to handle your eBay retail business. If you’re already using an auction management service that does not provide this capability, demand it of your vendor and hope that you get it soon. Again, some of the vendors will purport to do these datafeeds automatically to a variety of different datafeed marketplaces. The question you have to ask yourself is, How do they do this? This idea of using datafeeds to expand your marketplace is so new that it seems likely most of the vendors haven’t rationalized their processes to the point where it makes it easy for you to take advantage of this new marketing technique. Make some noise.

Example Marketplaces

Froogle and Yahoo aren’t the only datafeed marketplace opportunities. Here is a sampling of others:

BizRate, http://www.bizrate.com

BottomDollar.com, http://www.bottomdollar.com

Calibex, http://www.calibex.com

Digital Saver, http://www.digitalsaver.com

EveryPrice, http://www.everyprice.com

Interactive Reviews, http://www.interactivereviews.com

MySimon, http://www.mysimon.com

NexTag, http://www.nextag.com

PriceArrow, http://www.pricearrow.com

PriceFish, http://www.pricefish.com

PriceGrabber, http://www.pricegrabber.com

PriceHead, http://www.pricehead.com

PriceScan, http://www.pricescan.com

ShopCartUSA, http://www.shopcartusa.com

Shopping.com, http://www.shopping.com

Shopzilla, http://www.shopzilla.com

Each is a little different. They each take different subsets of data and charge different fees. Most are comparison websites. Some may be affiliates of others; that is, a datafeed to one may result in a presence on others. This is a fast changing ecommerce environment, and you will want to ivestigate each possibility to determine what it can do for you.

Most are comparison shopping directories, which are currently very popular. They list products and provide a list of vendors and prices for each product. The vendors are rated by customers. The products are also rated by customers.

Most buyers use these marketplaces to find the lowest prices. They can look at the ratings of the various vendors and the rating of the product itself. Thus, they can find non-financial information upon which to make a decision as well as pricing information. Some datafeed marketplaces charge fees, and some don’t.

Cost-Effectiveness Review

Again, the first question you will want to ask is, Does the datafeed marketplace in which I want to place my products charge a fee? If the answer is no, then it might be a good deal, particularly for specialized marketplaces where you can expect to generate some sales. If the datafeed marketplace charges a fee, then you have to look at the cost-effectiveness very closely and probably undergo some experimentation to determine whether it’s worth it for you to sell there.

Specialized marketplaces might work well, and comparison shopping directories are quite popular. Check them out to determine whether they are cost-effective.