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E-commerce: A Solution to the Comparison Shopping Engine Hassle
October 10, 2006

Does your company market products through comparison shopping engines? Comparison shopping engines (CSEs) are sites such as Yahoo! Shopping, Shopping.com, Gifts.com, Pricegrabber, NexTag, MSN Shopping, Google Base and Shopzilla. CSEs aggregate SKU data from retailers for online shoppers. Some retailers avoid CSEs due the technical hassle of sending product data to the engines and retrieving corresponding advertising cost reports. But today, the National Retail Federation (NRF) announced a new data format intended to simplify communication between retailers, agencies and CSEs. The beta test of the standard took place last week when engineers at Channel Intelligence used the format to submit product data for