Getting Started With RetailTower
Channel marketing is the process of listing your store's inventory on comparison shopping engines such as Google products search, Bing shopping, Shopzilla, etc..
To begin listing your product on shopping engines; register with the engines first, then on the RetailTower settings page, select which method you would want to submit your products to the engine of your choice.
Key Steps To List On Comparison Shopping Engines
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Creating A Merchant Account
This is a one-time activity. Registeration differs from engine to engine. The bottom-line is that, the engines may/may not provide you a username, password, feedname and some other details which you will further proceed to enter on Retailtower settings page.
click here to see how to register on selected channels: Google Products Search, Bing, Become.com, TheFind.com, Shopzilla.com, GoShopping, SortPrice.com, Pronto, and Onewayshopping.com
NB. Some are free whiles others paid.
2. The second step is to enter your account details on the RetailTower settings page:
- You should however note that not all engines will require details. Some may require you provide them just a link to your feeds; In this case, they will pick up the feeds from RetailTower as scheduled on their system. A typical link to a feed on RetailTower looks like this. http://retailtower.com/myexports/442qqw66es/google/export.txt A similar link can be seen on your RetailTower dashboard or settings page.
- Another option by the engines is to let you upload the feed manually to them. On the settings page, you set manual uploads as your option for that engine.
- The last option, which is similar to web uploads but you don't manually upload. You transfer your files to the engine through a process called FTP [File Transfer Protocol]. The key here is that, you enter your FTP details, [ftp username, password, and feedname]
3. Pushing your campaign:
After entering your channel datails and selecting your transfer options, you head over to your dashboard to submit feeds.
- If you selected HTTP, then a link will be generated for you on your dashboard. Copy the link and submit to your channel.
- For FTP, you will see a submit button on your dashboard, just click to submit. If you have success it means the feed has been uploaded. If you have error it means the details you entered don't much that given to you by your channel. Edit your details on the settings page of retailtower and submit again.
- For manual uploads, you will see download button, click to download then heard to you channel website to upload the file.