As a confirmation of what Printfection told us about yesterday I received a letter from Google about my Zazzle feeds. Other people received them about their Cafepress and other POD feeds.

Hello,

We’re happy to let you know that as of September 3rd, individual sellers on marketplaces no longer need to submit feeds to Google Product Search. Going forward, marketplaces will be responsible for submitting a feed of all their sellers’ items, so we will be retiring your account to avoid duplicate entries on Product Search. Zazzle will also be responsible for ensuring that your feeds are up-to-date and compliant with our policies.

In most cases, marketplaces already submit feeds of their sellers’ items. If you have any further questions about your items or Google Product Search, please contact Zazzle. We look forward to continuing to display your products, and hope you enjoy the new streamlined submission process.

Sincerely,

The Google Team

Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your Google Base product or account.

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

I love the way it says they are happy to tell us, like it’s good news, when in fact most POD shopkeepers and even the PODs themselves will lose out because of this.

Printfection made this announcement a few days ago but of course it is relevant to all POD sites as far as I can see.

We were notified by Google today of changes Google is implementing to their Google Base/ Google Product service. Starting tomorrow, September 3, 2009 Google’s new policy will no longer allow non-domain owners to submit products to Google Base on behalf of the domain. This means you cannot submit products to Google Base with www.printfection.com in the URL as you are not the “domain owner” for printfection.com. Furthermore, any products with www.printfection.com URLs you have submitted to Google Base in the past will be removed from Google Base shortly.

Going forward, all products will have to be submitted directly from Printfection, from a single Printfection-Owned Google Base account. Please be patient while we work on a new solution to submit your designs and products to Google Base.

To be honest, because I have been so busy I haven’t been uploading my feeds to Google base recently anyway but this will be a further blow to many shopkeepers, especially Cafepress shopkeepers who are fervently trying to compete with Cafepress itself for sale of their items. It’s hard enough to compete with CP anyway because they have the resources (paid for with our sweat) but this development doesn’t help at all.

In the case of Cafepress, there might be a workaround though. If you have set up a domain with cpshop you may be able to create a feed using that website. I think I have heard of it being done but I haven’t done it myself. If I get time to figure it out I will certainly post about it here. And of course you could opt out of the Cafepress marketplace. I haven’t done that either. When I get more time I will see how to proceed.

It’s been a long time since my last post here. Sorry about that guys. It’s not that there hasn’t been stuff going on in the POD universe. Quite the contrary actually but I just haven’t had the time.

Anyway there has just been an announcement at Zazzle about some new features and these are two features that people have been really hoping for for a long time. The one that excites me most is the ability to use Statcounter at Zazzle. Zazzle already had a system in place for Google Analytics but that is really for the big boys with thousands or at least hundreds of unique visitors a day. Statcounter is ideal for the small shopkeeper and lets you analyze you traffic in detail. Thanks Zazzle!

We also added StatCounter support to your Store basic info page, the ability to upload PDF and Adobe Illustrator file formats for use on products, and made improvements to the Payment Settings and Preview Next Payment pages.

Categories is another great addition to the Zazzle shopkeeper toolbox.  They make it easier for our customers to find what they are looking for because they can browse by design and it also allows us to do improve our SEO. I think there is a bug at the moment wher if you click on the new category icon it takes you to the category but doesn’t show you the category text but if you select the category from the sidebar it does. Perhaps this is a feature rather than a bug? Anyway another good move Zazzle. Thanks.

As an aside I’d like to take a dig at Cafepress. There was a time when Zazzle and Cafepress were competing to add features for us shopkeepers, things that would make us happier and richer but these days Cafepress is just getting worse and worse. Now it seems that every time Zazzle adds a cool new feature Cafepress finds another way to screw us out of money.