"Froogle - What is it Good for?"
Ed Kohler - May, 2004
Have you been to Froogle yet? It’s a new product search engine
from Google. It’s actually existed for almost a year now, but
it only went live as a link from Google’s homepage in the past
month. It's quite possibly the greatest online marketing
tool for retailers ever invented.
What is Froogle?
Froogle is a product specific search engine that indexes catalogs of online
retailers and compiles the information for their users. Search for DVD
Players, and you’ll come up with 37,000 options as of this writing. You
can then filter down to DVD Players between $200-300 and still have 581
choices. Want a DVD/VCR combo? Add VCR to the search query to filter down
to 209 options, and then sort by price with one click. That should explain
the power of this program for consumers, but how do retailers make the
most out of this by getting in front of their prospective customers for
the products they sell?
The Froogle Feed
While Froogle will likely visit your catalog, index it, and add the products
to their search engine, the better way to go is to send Froogle a data
feed. This is basically a text file listing your product names, descriptions,
pricing information, images, and the URL of each product within your cart.
This will help Froogle accurately serve your cart's products with up to
date pricing.
What does it cost?
Nothing. Submitting to Froogle is free, and you can do it as often as
once a day (but at least once a month). Google has also stated that they
plan to keep Froogle free by serving Google Adwords ads alongside the
Froogle search results.
How do I build a Froogle Feed
After signing up with Froogle, they will send you an extensive set of
instructions on how to create a Froogle feed. If you have a small set
of products, you could easily whip up a Froogle feed in a spreadsheet
like Excel, then save it as a text file for upload to Froogle. However,
if you have a large inventory with volatile pricing, you’ll probably want
to look into exporting a Froogle feed from your database. One way to do
this is to have your webmaster script a tab delimited file on your in-stock
inventory so you can easily save it off and load it whenever you make
changes. If you want to turn that up another notch, have your webmaster
script your Froogle feed to automatically FTP itself on a regular schedule.
Get Froogling
If you have an online catalog and aren’t Froogling you’re passing up additional
sales. Sign up with Froogle today and get your Froogle on.
Ed Kohler is president of Haystack in a Needle and creates Froogle Feeds for his clients. Contact Ed today to get Froogling.
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