Froogle Sucks, or How Big Business Screws a Good Thing Up
Ah, Google, our favorite "get me something" search engine. You want it, they got it. Brilliant!
Except Google has ventured into the real world of business with this goofy monstrous beta called "Froogle." As cute as the name is, it's working structure is absolutely horrible.
The way it works is that vendors, small and large, can easily create a feed and upload it to Froogle. Customer's looking for stuff to buy can use Froogle to look for the best price and for off the beaten path items. The problem is that there are hundreds of thousands of vendors trying to make use of this new medium and Froogle isn't automated. I'm not kidding, everything is done by human hands for the first, oh, two or three months. Rediculous. If you sell something and need to update your feed to reflect that, forget about it. It either won't accept your new feed, or just keeps loading the old one anyway.
After I tried to upload my newest feed to Froogle, it told me my changes would appear after 3 hours. It's been two days and I'm still waiting.
I opened my own Froogle feed for my Etsy store over a month ago, it still isn't "live" as a real Froogle store. They're still waiting to see if I'm some kind of crook or something. Even if you attempt to follow Froogles rules and wait (and wait and wait), the rules appear to change at any time.
As far as information goes, Google is king. But in the realm of commerce, they suck so bad at the Froogle fuck up, it's embarassing.
I'm not all that impressed with Etsy either ( www.etsy.com ). I've been there since January or February, can't remember exactly when I signed up, but and they've had 4 major server crashes in that short period of time, and several other server issues that created a terrible vendor and visitor experience. It's pretty bad.
Another thing I don't like about it is the fact that they give us no control over our conversions. We have absolutely no idea where clicks are coming from. Inside, outside, who knows?? They won't even tell us what percentage of hits are coming from an outside link. As a result, we're clueless about our tags. Are they right? Wrong? Indifferent? It's none of our business, I guess.
There are things about Etsy that I love, however. I love the fact that Google crawls it constantly. I love the fact that each store has it's own feed. I really love the fact that it's so cheap to use, and that the user interface is exciting and fun. I like having the alternative of using my neat and clean Etsy store (www.tcbeads.etsy.com) instead of my old now-in-a-mess website.
I'm confident Etsy will straighten out the server issues, and may even let us in on what the conversion rates are, possibly offering us a little control. Froogle, however, I think is a gigantic, hopeless monster.
Except Google has ventured into the real world of business with this goofy monstrous beta called "Froogle." As cute as the name is, it's working structure is absolutely horrible.
The way it works is that vendors, small and large, can easily create a feed and upload it to Froogle. Customer's looking for stuff to buy can use Froogle to look for the best price and for off the beaten path items. The problem is that there are hundreds of thousands of vendors trying to make use of this new medium and Froogle isn't automated. I'm not kidding, everything is done by human hands for the first, oh, two or three months. Rediculous. If you sell something and need to update your feed to reflect that, forget about it. It either won't accept your new feed, or just keeps loading the old one anyway.
After I tried to upload my newest feed to Froogle, it told me my changes would appear after 3 hours. It's been two days and I'm still waiting.
I opened my own Froogle feed for my Etsy store over a month ago, it still isn't "live" as a real Froogle store. They're still waiting to see if I'm some kind of crook or something. Even if you attempt to follow Froogles rules and wait (and wait and wait), the rules appear to change at any time.
As far as information goes, Google is king. But in the realm of commerce, they suck so bad at the Froogle fuck up, it's embarassing.
I'm not all that impressed with Etsy either ( www.etsy.com ). I've been there since January or February, can't remember exactly when I signed up, but and they've had 4 major server crashes in that short period of time, and several other server issues that created a terrible vendor and visitor experience. It's pretty bad.
Another thing I don't like about it is the fact that they give us no control over our conversions. We have absolutely no idea where clicks are coming from. Inside, outside, who knows?? They won't even tell us what percentage of hits are coming from an outside link. As a result, we're clueless about our tags. Are they right? Wrong? Indifferent? It's none of our business, I guess.
There are things about Etsy that I love, however. I love the fact that Google crawls it constantly. I love the fact that each store has it's own feed. I really love the fact that it's so cheap to use, and that the user interface is exciting and fun. I like having the alternative of using my neat and clean Etsy store (www.tcbeads.etsy.com) instead of my old now-in-a-mess website.
I'm confident Etsy will straighten out the server issues, and may even let us in on what the conversion rates are, possibly offering us a little control. Froogle, however, I think is a gigantic, hopeless monster.
posted by Teresa at 3:54 PM
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