Patent ID: 8458039

Claim:
A non-transitory computer readable medium embodying a program executable by at least one computing device, comprising: an item feed application configured to periodically send a feed of a subset of a plurality of items to a comparison shopping network site over a network, the items being sold to a plurality of customers through an electronic commerce network site over the network; and a feed content control process comprising: code that identifies at least one of the items that is excluded from the feed, wherein a period of exclusion is associated with the at least one of the items; code that fetches from a data store a site wide forecast of all sales of the at least one of the items through the electronic commerce network site during a predefined period of time prior to the period of exclusion; code that fetches a number of sales for the at least one of the items that were subject to a referral from a referral network site during the predefined period of time before the period of exclusion; code that generates a forecast of sales through the electronic commerce network site subject to the referral from the referral network site for the at least one of the items based at least in part upon the site wide forecast and the number of sales for the at least one of the items; and code that determines whether to reintroduce the at least one of the items into the feed by applying a number of referrals associated with the at least one of the items over the predefined period of time prior to the period of exclusion and the forecast of sales for the at least one of the items to at least one exclusion rule.