Month: September 2017

I recently bought 2 gift cards from Cardpool.com to make a purchase from WestElm.com for a friend’s wedding registry.

Cardpool has two delivery options, Email and Physical.

From their website it says:
Email Cards
Email gift cards are delivered via email. While it will typically only take ten minutes for you to receive your eGift card, it can take up to 1 business day if further verification is needed.

Physical Gift Cards
All physical gift cards are sent via FREE USPS First Class Mail and should arrive in 3-7 business days. During peak holiday periods and USPS holidays, delivery may take a little longer.

Because 3-7 business days is far too long, I opted for Email, because I wanted to purchase my item on WestElm immediately as it was for a wedding registry.

Here is the sequence of events:
Sept 11, 2017 8:29pm – Ordered gift card #1

Sept 11, 2017 9:23pm – Ordered gift card #2

Because I ordered via email, I was really hoping it would take only 10 minutes, but nope, I didn’t even get the gift card codes delivered the same day.

Sept 12, 2017 – 8:06AM – Card #2 is delivered

Sept 12, 2017 – 9:41AM – I emailed support@cardpool.com asking how much longer it would take to get my card #1.

Sept 12, 2017 -2:19PM – Card #1 is delivered

Sept 14, 2017  – 2:42 PM – I finally get a response from support saying:

Thank you for contacting Cardpool.com! We do apologize for the long wait to receive a response and appreciate your patience regarding this matter. We are experiencing a high number of emails and we only answer them in the order we receive them.

Our processing center typically completes all electronic gift card orders within one business day of the purchase. The orders are very often shipped within a few hours, however there is some processing time involved as we verify the value of every gift card before it is sent. In some cases we may ask for additional verification and your order will remain pending until we receive the necessary documentation requested.

Not only did getting a response take over 2 days, but the information listed on their website implies it’s usually 10 minutes, not a few hours. 

Luckily nobody bought the registry item by the time I received both gift cards.

I’ve been a CardPool user for over 2.5 years, and this is a very upsetting experience, and makes me wonder if the few bucks I saved was worth the hassle.

Commerce Connector is a SaaS platform that helps brands and retailers drive customers to the physical stores.

You’ll need to provide address infomration as well as prodcut attributes as per the Commerce Connenctor specifications.

Curalate is a platform that makes social selling easier.

While there aren’t very many fields in the Curalate feed specifications, you should make sure to optimize product titles, and have correct product groupings.

Curulate even has a direct Shopify API integration, but of course that means you don’t get to use any title optimization in between.

Shoppable is a retailer checkout solution created to simplify the checkout process.

Creating a feed for Shoppable is very custom as it requires a direct API connetion with custom fields, which you can gather from looking at the Shoppable feed specifications.

ShopMania is a great price comparison channel to try.

Creating a feed for ShopMania is a little different than for Google Shopping for example because it has a custom format with many optional fields.

The ShopMania feed specifications aren’t too difficult though, and it’s important to optimize all the relevant feed fields.

Shopbot is a great price comparison channel to use to target people in Canada.

When creating and optimizing your feed, you should check out the Shopbot feed specifications to get an idea of the required fields.

You’ll need to create a CSV or XML feed that you can send to Shopbot via FTP.

Adform is a large player in Ad tech with a powerful platform allowing marketers to plan, serve ads, and comes with a full reporting suite.

Adform feeds can be submitted in either CSV or XML form according to the Adform feed specifications.

The required Adform feed fields include:

product_id
product_name
product_category_id
product_deeplink
product_image
product_price

Kelkoo is a great advertising channel for retailers who want to sell products in Europe.

Creating a Kelkoo feed is a little different than creating one for other channels like Google Shopping. You can create a Kelkoo feed in either XML or CSV format manually, but the Kelkoo feed specifications have quite a few attributes to be optimized.

Many of the Kelkoo feed attributes are very important from a relevancy perspective, especially the title and description.