This week, “G.” in Burnett, TX, writes:

Dear Feed Doctor,
I’m having a week-long promotion the first week of September. Can I write a business rule that will automatically add promotional text to my feeds that week?

The answer is: “yes, but it’s not pretty.”

The GETCURRENTDATE Function
I’ve been trying to keep these posts short, but it’s more fun to give people the long story, so bear with me. Most of the time a Shopping Engine’s data feed has a single line at the top of the feed called a header, and the header usually is just a list of the names of the fields in the feed. I know; big news flash, right? Sometimes, though, an engine’s header is more complicated, and it may contain things like date and time that the feed was generated. And in keeping with the grand tradition of comparison shopping, no two engines want the date/time formatted the same way. To support this, we came up with a function called GETCURRENTDATE. The good news for G. is that she can use it, too.

GETCURRENTDATE has only a single input; it’s a text value that tells the function how to format the date and time. This is sometimes called a format string. This is just a series of code letters; each letter represents a digit of the date or time:

• yy: 2-digit year
• yyyy: 4-digit year
• MM: 2-digit month
• dd: 2-digit day
• hh: 2-digit hour
• tt: AM or PM
• HH: 2-digit hour (24-hour system)
• mm: 2-digit minute

You can combine these with separators, such as dashes, colons, or slashes, and you MUST put quotation marks around the whole thing. For example:
GETCURRENTDATE("yyyy/MM/dd")

I just used that in a feed, and here’s what I got:
2007/08/14

Nice Digression, But…
Right, now what about the original question: how can we write a rule that “turns on” at a certain day and “turns off” again on another day? Well, here’s where it’s not pretty: you can treat the output of GETCURRENTDATE as a number, and compare it to two different numbers that represent your start and end dates. Now, there is certainly more than one way to do this, but here’s what I suggest for G’s case: think of the start date as 20070901 and the end date as 20070907. Now she just needs to write the following rule:

IF(GETCURRENTDATE("yyyyMMdd")>=20070901 AND GETCURRENTDATE("yyyyMMdd")<=20070907,"Item on Sale","")

What this rule does is look at the current date; if it is between Sep. 1 and Sep. 7, then the “then” part of the IF is returned; otherwise, the “else” part is returned. Note that I left that blank; this assumes that G’s feed normally has no promo text. She could, of course, have some inventory field that is her normal promo text. If that’s the case, she could change the rule to be:

IF(GETCURRENTDATE("yyyyMMdd")>=20070901 AND GETCURRENTDATE("yyyyMMdd"),<=20070907,"Item on Sale",$somefield)

All right, that’s all for this edition. See you next week!

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If eBay’s MissionFish program is not today part of your eBay strategy then I encourage you to join Kristin Cunningham (General Manager, eBay Giving Works) and David Yaskulka (Vice President, Product Marketing, Kompolt) next week to learn how it can help you differentiate your retail brand, attract new customers, and improve customer loyalty by giving back to causes important to you and your market.

Kristin and David will be joined next Wednesday, August 16th, at 2 p.m. EST by special guest Elizabeth Bennett of Africa Direct, a Platinum PowerSeller and winner of the 2007 eBay Community Hall of Fame award.

Click here to register for the webinar.

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ChannelAdvisor was the first Channel Management Solution (CMS) to support Interactive Inc.’s Pronto comparison shopping site in 2006. Scott Hurff over at our CSE Strategies blog caught up with CEO John Foley a little over a year after the launch to talk about Pronto’s latest release and social shopping.

Recommended reading if you want to understand what comparison shopping engines are doing to grow consumer loyalty and adopt social commerce.

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Lately my posts have been exceedingly long, and I know nobody wants to read that much, so I’m going to try to keep this one short. This week, “C.” in De Smet, SD writes:

Dear Feed Doctor,

My inventory data doesn’t have a shipping price, but I know what each item’s shipping price SHOULD be: it’s based on the item’s selling price. If the price is less than $20, shipping is $1.99; if the price is more than $20 but less than $50, shipping is $4.99; and for items over $50, shipping is $9.99 . Can I use a lookup list to do this?

Well, C., the answer is: no.
(more…)

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Amazon has pulled the curtains on its Flexible Payment Service (FPS) and launched it in limited beta. And it’s a beauty.

FPS is not so much a consumer payment solution with heavy marketing but more a payment platform that can be used by developers to build payment solutions in the spirit of Amazon’s S3 storage product (eCommerce enabler). Here’s what it offers:

1. Send and receive money using credit card, bank account or Amazon Payments balance transfer as payment methods.
2. Create “Payment Instructions” to define conditions and constraints desired for a given transaction, and programmatically obtain payment authorizations or “tokens” that represent these Payment Instructions from customers.
3. Execute one-time, multiple, or recurring payments on behalf of customers.
   Aggregate micro-transactions into a single larger transaction using Prepaid and Postpaid capabilities.
4. Build payment applications where you are neither the sender nor the recipient of funds. You can build marketplace applications that enable the movement of money between two third parties.
5. View account balances, transaction histories, and transaction details on the Amazon Payments web site.

(more…)

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