Laying Tracks For Shopping Feed Standards

Submitting product data to comparison shopping sites and search engines can be a taxing process. Each engine has its own feed format and special requirements that create extra work and lower ROIs for retailers while reducing revenue and efficiency for the engines (especially the smaller ones). Understandably, then, a movement has begun to standardize the process. Last week the Rimm-Kaufman Group (RKG) president and chief technology officer (CTO) Alan Rimm-Kaufman. Rimm-Kaufman calls the current hodgepodge of feed formats "a Tower of Babel" as retailers have to learn several communication methods to submit product information (prices, thumbnails, product descriptions) across engines like Froogle, eBay, Amazon, et cetera. Retailers would like to easily participate in comparison engines, says Rimm-Kaufman, but all these engines require slightly different formats. One of Rimm-Kaufman's main talking points is a comparison to the early days of the railroad. In the 19th century, when tracks were being laid across the country, different areas of the country had different track widths. The nation needed a standard size for interstate travel or "in different places, your wheels wouldn't fit the track." Rimm-Kaufman, with the backing of