So, all you online retailers revving up for the holiday shopping season and wondering what you might be inadvertently leaving on the table? Thinking perhaps that your products should be represented (or better represented) in the comparison shopping engines? Well, you’re not alone. Don’t stress too much, however, because the shopping engines (Yahoo! Shopping, Froogle, Shopping.com, Pricegrabber, MSN Shopping, Gifts.com, etc.) typically represent only a relatively small slice of etailers’ traffic. But there’s always room for improvement, and Alan Rimm-Kaufman and Larry Becker (of the Rimm-Kaufman Group) offer some valuable tips to maximize the shopping feed opportunity, such as:

• Set up an automated routine to remove discontinued items from your feeds. This should be done automatically each day or week. And continuously monitor your presence on the feeds. Most of the feeds will simply drop any URLs they consider malformed; only some will tell you when they do so.
• You need an algorithm that handles your entire product assortment. While some of the engines allow you to improve placement by bidding, many do not. Success depends then on what you send, and as we mentioned earlier, each feed requires its own recipe.
• You’ll also want to use product titles that reflect how most people describe the things you sell; jargon can make you hard to find.
• Work with your internal team or your search agency to establish a feed testing regimen. Test one feed algorithm against another. As always you’ll want to ensure that each URL has a unique tracking code identifying the specific product on your site and the engine where your ad is served.