I’ve been up since 5am because of the rollout today, so this post will be short and simple. Today’s letter comes from “R.” in Winterset, IA. He writes:

Dear Feed Doctor,
Some of my item titles are in ALL CAPS, but in my feeds I’d like to have “proper” or “title” casing, so that only the first letter of each word is capitalized. Let me guess: I need a regex, right?

That’s a good guess, R., but we actually have a function that does just what you want. It’s called PROPER. It takes in a text input, and outputs that text just as you said: all the letters are lower-case, except the first letter of each word, which is upper-case. Here’s what the R’s rule looks like:

PROPER($offername)

And here are some examples:

Now, nitpickers might point out that this isn’t technically title casing, because PROPER will capitalize conjunctions, articles, and prepositions (”and,” “the,” “of,” etc.). Well, they’re right. As a nitpicker myself, I sympathize. If it really bothers you, write to me and we’ll come up with a regular expression or something to fix it.

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Ten days until our Catalyst UK event in London at Vinopolis right on the doorstep of London’s Borough Food Market. Which I have never been to, so that’s a cool bonus.

Following our Catalyst US event last week our team in the UK has put together a great agenda:

• Mark Lewis, Managing Director, eBay UK on “eBay: Evolving Opportunities on the World’s Online Marketplace”
• Scot Wingo, CEO, ChannelAdvisor Corporation on “The Latest Multi-Channel Online Trends”
• Robert Swerling, Strategic Partner Development Manager of Google on “A View into Google’s Long Tail Strategy”
  Colleen Aubrey, Senior Manager, Business Development of Amazon.co.uk on “Amazon Opportunities for Retailers in 2008”
• Carl-Olav Scheible, Managing Director of PayPal UK on “How Account Based payments Drive Incremental Merchant Sales”
• David Smith, Director of Operations of IMRG on “UK Online Retail – What’s in Store for 2008”
• Bill Alexander, Managing Director of Red Letter Days Ltd. on “Experience The Brand Imperative”
• Luke Taylor, Senior Product Manager of Play.com on “How to Succeed on the UK’s Newest Marketplace: PlayTrade”

Of course you’ll also have a chance to talk to many of us working ChannelAdvisor about online retailing strategies, our products, our new support of Amazon Seller Central in the UK (me! me! me!), our Technical Services (Support, Implementation) or where on the cruise ship you’ll have the best view and most favorable access to the bar. Get real-time updates / news / logistics during the conference by following us on Twitter (www.twitter.com/channeladvisor).

And, no, it’s not too late to join. Head on over to www.channeladvisor.com/catalyst/UK and click “Register” to sign up. I can’t promise though that we won’t highlight you as a procrastinator during the conference.

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We announced during last week’s Catalyst conference in Pinehurst, NC (Chris at TameBay of course was quick to cover it) our support for Buy.com — and needless to say attendees were crowding Buy.com CEO Neel Grover with questions on product fit, how quickly they could launch, fees and international capabilities.

Here’s a quick snapshot that highlights this opportunity:

• Buy.com’s shopping experience is similar to the Amazon marketplace with checkout occurring on the site.
• No listing fees (risk-free selling!), only category-specific commission for each sale.
• Buy.com today has over 11 Million buyers purchasing consumer electronics, jewelry, home & garden, media and health & beauty products.
• Launch of apparel and shoes category forthcoming.
• Approximately 1,000 sellers are participating in the marketplace today.
• Backfilling select product detail pages with comparison shopping links from Pricegrabber and select other CSEs. Here’s a good example of a Nikon D40 bundle that shows how these offerings live side-by-side.

We have been working with Buy.com on our end-to-end integration so that you spend as little time as possible listing your products and processing your orders within ChannelAdvisor and will be launching our solution in the summer. If you are interested (and you should be) head on over to http://www.channeladvisor.com/buycom/ to be one of the first in line to sell on Buy.com through our MarketplaceAdvisor Premium product. Or ping me with any questions that you may have at maxl at channeladvisor.com.

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