Amazing Race Feeds Into E-Commerce

Reality show contestants don't vanish into fictional poofs at the show's conclusion. They're not the cast of Friends; there is life after the show. Chip Arndt, half of the winning duo of Amazing Race 4, left reality stardom to set up Merchant Advantage, an e-commerce company small businesses need to know about.

Merchant Advantage's Channel Management, a hosted solution to help small and medium sized businesses (SMB) deal with managing their feeds to shopping comparison sites, measuring click performance and return on investment (ROI). Contacting an e-business publication to hock your product is not unusual. If you saw my inbox, you'd cringe at the almost spam-level deluge of press releases. Arndt's reality celebrity status got my attention, but it was the relevance of his company that kept it. The price didn't hurt either: $245 per month for a service bigger companies drop thousands for; a service that throws your marketing team, drowning in catalogue minutia, a lifeline so they can create. Or better for some, it keeps information and analysis in-house. The tool is designed to cut out consultants and middlemen by automating certain tasks while bolstering the seller's decision-making ability. Merchant Advantage boasts partnerships with eBay, ProStores, Become.com, Shopzilla, Gifts.com, and PriceGrabber, among others, all of whom have their own feed submission processes, informational and technical requirements. Merchant Advantage has addressed this time consuming (and difficult to measure) issue by allowing clients to upload product information and specify the desired channels in Channel Management using a dashboard. And, well, from what here.") Drag this to your Bookmarks. Add to document.write("Del.icio.us") Yahoo My Web