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Agreed, Alan has set him self apart as an expert and would surely be able to provide you some good advice. He recently spoke at SMX advanced in Seattle and it was really useful information. Give him a shot. There is also a wonderful Whiteboard Friday that Rand Fishkin just did discussing how SEO has changed since the Panda update. This might be helpful as well.
We have been managing clients data feeds for the comparison shopping engines for 2 years. We use Pricegrabber, Nextag, Shopzilla, Google Product Search, and Bing Merchant Center to name a few. We use a product called GoDataFeed to manage all our feeds. It is $99 a month and once you get the hang of it is so much simpler than trying to manage all the feeds manually. Also a great resource to check out that took us forever to find is called CPC Strategies, and their blog has useful information at http://blog.cpcstrategy.com/. They also put out the quarterly comparison of all the shopping engines. Hope that helps.
It is worth more effort to go for the long term relationships with respected bloggers and sites. Asking for a backlink from a webmaster is practically dead. I mean it is a numbers game and the more people you straight up ask, the better chance that you will get a few here and there. However, by building up a relationship with a blogger or site you have something meaningful over time that will produce more fruitage. Sometimes by contacting a prominent blog ahead of a release of a good piece of content you can build anticipation and get them to take your piece on by generating more perceived value in their eye, and thus getting you a good link. Hope that helps!
We do a lot of Google Product Search for our Ecommerce clients. Basically the feeds last for 30 days on GPS. So if you submit them once a month you will continue to show, but Google favors those who push out a new feed more frequently. One of the big things right now is to make sure you have Unique Product Identifiers like UPC or Manufacturer Part Numbers for all your products. The better quality your images of your products are (clear thumbnails, easy to understand what the product is the better for click through by users). If you name your product's with Keywords that trigger the GPS listings in organic search you will do better as well. For example if you were selling a Spider Mite Pesticide, you could just put the internal name of the product like "No Spider Mites 16oz Bottle" You would be better off calling the product "Spider Mite Killer 16oz Bottle" since that search actually brings up the GPS results in universal search. If you have a product that many sellers have, then you can get grouped in with the rest of them by using the same UPC/GTIN number as they do, or the same brand and MPN. It takes some getting used to for sure, maybe try the service called GoDataFeed as it makes it a lot easier. Lastly, categories are huge for getting your products in the right group. It is better to be in the Software -> Adobe-> Windows Adobe Design Premium category with your products than just the Software -> category. Hope that helps you out.