While Shopping.com (SDC) execs blatantly denied my claims that there were any problems on their end going into the holiday shopping season of 2007, it seems that the company has since modified it’s position.

First, Josh Silverman, SDC’s outgoing CEO said in the February Merchant Support Newsletter, “As our traffic increased in the past quarter, it placed some unexpected strains on our systems.” That’s a far cry from what I was told when SDC cut off new advertisers.

And now after taking down the Merchant Account Center (MAC) 2 times for a total of 14hrs in the last week (according to the notifications), SDC has launched a public Help Center.

The full announcement is here. This is an excerpt:

Previously, our help tab was integrated into the Merchant Account Center and only provided access to solutions in our database. Now, you can search the knowledge Base as well as interact with other merchants under our supervision in our new Beta Merchant Support Forums! There, you can post optimization information, bidding statistics or tips, discuss your marketplace, or troubleshoot a technical issue in a public space so others can take advantage of your experience.

We’ve also changed the process of how to submit a case. All cases will be submitted through the knowledge base page. Additionally, once you detail your issue, keywords in your inquiry’s subject and body will be used to find solutions related to your issue in case you couldn’t manually find what you were looking for! With this feature, our Account Managers hope to provide you faster, more detailed responses to questions about your performance rather than focusing on How-To’s or other technical issues.

With this announcement, we are pleased to redefine our services to you as well as decrease our current advertised response time from 7 days to 3!

It’s nice to see Shopping.com making the effort to help it’s merchants. The Help Center is public and can be accessed here.

Seems that Shopping.com is now making use of SalesForce’s web-to-case management system which allows merchants to log their own cases, get suggested solutions, and have the cases be routed directly to an account manager. Coincidentally, SingleFeed is implementing the exact same system this week, although I’d say the parallels end there.

My #1 suggested resolution for the shopping engines for 2008 was to provide more transparency. While I meant this in a number of ways (and left it open to interpretation), one way was to open up a bit and tell merchants what’s going on. At SingleFeed we screw up every once in a while, but our account managers are transparent about the process. That openness doesn’t solve everything, but it goes a long way in building trust.

Shopping.com is going the right direction with this Help Center. I was shocked (in a good way) to see that they had opened up public forums. While the threads will be under ‘[SDC's] supervision’, the initial three four posts have been negative and SDC hasn’t removed them:

“I am being charged hundreds of dollars per month although the product has been removed a while ago!!! Please look into this matter and provide contact informations! This is an urgent matter.”

“We too are being billed for products that have been removed OVER 5 months ago. I contacted support before this new support area was setup with no resolution.

We tracked down two sites offering the outdated feeds www.racecarpartysupplies.com and www.napkinholders.net both run by the same company. There are more but I’m unable to locate them.

Our frustration of not getting any support on this matter is also likely to drive us to abandon Shopping.com as well.”

I’ve been pulling my hair out for 3 days now trying to get my products to map properly and it is IMPOSSIBLE to get any help. No contact email or phone number. I’m ready to pull the account.

Anyone else notice that for many weeks now the Bidding Tool not only fails to display all the bids? Instead, for example, the bidding tool truncates the bid list (see Health and Beauty for example) so that it lists only about 43 bids from 1-43. The list is missing more than 600 bidders and bids. It is not particularly useful as it is.

So far, so good. Look forward to see more of these improvements.