This interview marks the second of two we have conducted with the folks over at Channel Intelligence. For more insights into the company and their services be sure to check out the first interview we did with Vik Murty about SellPath.

As a core part of their solution, Channel Intelligence offers industry leading comparison shopping and data feed services for merchants and eCommerce sellers who are interested in receiving high-end channel marketing technology from a company with a long standing reputation in this industry. The individual comparison shopping services are designed to make the process of generating, uploading, optimizing and tracking feeds as simple and easy as possible on the publisher. Also, they are setup in a way that makes it absolutely clear which campaigns are producing what, giving additional insight into the campaigns that may need to be improved or tweaked in order to produce the desired results.

ChannelBrain is Freeportway’s (parent company) service for eCommerce merchants looking to market or sell within Online marketing channels such as comparison shopping engines (CSE’s) and shopping portals. ChannelBrain’s solution is designed to help and facilitate the process of syndicating various products offered by merchants and eTailers to numerous CSE’s all from one, simple to use location and tool. In addition to the formatting, ease of syndication and one-click solution, ChannelBrain also offers users the ability to create their campaigns so that progress, or lack of, can be tracked.

We have recently added a new section to our comparison shopping guide dedicated to the top data feed companies that currently offer comparison shopping engine listing services including feed generation, submission, distribution, management and tracking. Some merchants find it difficult to setup, manage and track their individual CSE campaigns and sometimes they just don’t have the time to deal with all that’s involved. For this reason, several companies now offer different services designed to help ease or take-over these tasks for any merchant who may fit into either category.

One such company featured on our data feeds list, DoubleClick Performics, was gracious enough to spend some time with me in order to discuss their comparison shopping solution details more in depth. I hope to eventually take the time to talk with each company on our list so that our readers can pick and choose based on the individual needs or goals of any CSE campaign.

Google Base Blog announced today that they are changing the name of their ‘bulk uploads’ tab to be more in line with eCommerce publisher and merchant terminology. The tab will now be called ‘data feeds,’ which still appears under the My Items tab next to Active and Inactive Item links (see screenshot above).

Lots of news from Google Base this past week. Sweet!!

There was a post yesterday afternoon on the Google Base blog announcing the re-introduction of the model_number attribute. Model numbers are similar to the MPN (manufacturers part number) or UPC (Universal Product Code) data feed attributes.

The Google Base blog has a new post today announcing the addition of a new bulk upload dashboard within Base user accounts. This announcement comes shortly after an interview I conducted where I was told they would be adding some features and continuing to improve what they already have. I was just commenting with one of our readers about the lack of posts on Base’s blog, it’s nice to see them post again so soon.

Announcing Google Product Search Partner Program

Google recently added a new page and a new partner program to their services menu. The program is meant for data feed companies who allow online sellers to easily integrate with Google Product Search (formerly Froogle) and Google Base. So far, three companies have been named official Google Product Search Partners. ChannelAdvisor, Channel Intelligence and SingleFeed all made the inaugural list and now appear alongside the bullet points outlined on the new partner page.

Comparison Shopping Then & Now:

Since the late 90’s, comparison shopping has been an important part of Online selling and eCommerce. Over the years it has changed drastically from what it once was and has now grown far beyond what anyone could have predicted back then.

Live.com Product Search & MSN Shopping Overview:

Live Search was officially released from beta in September of 2006 when it began to power MSN search results. Since then we have seen many more beta projects from Windows including feeds search and even one for products. Windows Live Product Search is meant to compete with other online comparison shopping giants including Google Product Search, Yahoo Shopping, Shopping.com and more.