Thinking About Shopping Comparison Engines:Part One

This post comes to you courtesy of Brian Smith. Brian runs SingleFeed, a self- service data feed management, submission, and optimization system for small and medium sized merchants. He is also an analyst for the shopping comparison engine industry through his blog, ComparisonEngines.com. In the first post of this two-part article, Brian will talk about concerns merchants may have with shopping comparison sites. Part two will discuss how to get started with shopping comparison engines. –Paul

There are so many online marketing channels to pay attention to, that it’s extremely difficult to keep up with all the options, let alone effectively launch new campaigns. Whether you’re a small or large retailer, you’re most likely already thinking about search engine optimization (SEO) and have implemented a pay per click (PPC) marketing campaign on Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google Adwords. And you’re already overwhelmed. Then you add on email marketing, and an affiliate program, and you think you’re done. Well, don’t forget about the shopping comparison engines!

Shopping comparison engines have been around for years, so I’m sure you’ve heard of Yahoo! Shopping, Shopping.com (Dealtime, Epinions), Shopzilla (BizRate), NexTag (Calibex), PriceGrabber, and Google Base (Froogle). You might have even tested out this marketing channel in the past. Most likely, you’ve also been a consumer on one of these shopping engines as 1 in 3 Internet users pass through a shopping comparison engine during the peak holiday shopping season.

From a consumer perspective, shopping comparison engines allow shoppers to research products through buying guides and reviews, quickly see which merchants are reputable, and determine a good price for a product. From a merchant perspective, shopping comparison engines can deliver targeted, highly converting traffic as consumers using the engines are figuring out where to buy and how much to pay.

While the shopping comparison engines started out selling electronics, the soft goods categories like apparel, shoes, furniture, and cosmetics are now the fastest growing categories and total sales in these channels now rival sales of electronics. In fact, anything that you can think of is probably being sold on the shopping comparison engines.

Unfortunately, the shopping comparison engines have two strikes against them. First, most retailers think of them as price comparison engines. Second, shopping comparison engines can be more difficult to work with than the PPC engines. I’ll address these two issues and then tell you how to get started on the shopping engines.

Price Comparison Engine or Shopping Comparison Engine?

Many marketers think that if they can’t compete on price, they shouldn’t even try participating in the shopping comparison engine space. While price plays an important part of anyone’s buying decision, there are many other factors – ratings/reviews, promotional messaging, bidding – which influence buying habits on the shopping comparison engines. In other words, it’s very easy for a small business to compete on the shopping engines. I’d even argue that the small guys have an equal chance of attracting attention on the shopping engines because they have the flexibility to manipulate data quickly and easily, while the big guys are doing limited optimization and often relying on their brand.

Also, by participating in the shopping comparison engine ratings/reveiws game, you have an opportunity to build up additional credibility for your site, which is always important for small and medium sized merchants. Once you have generated enough positive reviews on Shopzilla, PriceGrabber, and other shopping engines, you can display their ’seal of approval’ which can increase your store’s conversion rate.

Are Shopping Comparison Engines difficult to work with?

As opposed to PPC engines which might take a couple minutes to set up and a day at the most to get ads live, working with shopping comparison engines is definitely a lot more labor intensive. To get on Yahoo! Shopping, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, NexTag, or Google Base, a merchant must create a data feed. These data feeds contain a list of products and associated attributes like product description, SKU, UPC, category, sale price, shipping weight, brand, etc. There are more than 100 defined product attributes and an unlimited amount of custom attributes. Most shopping engines require 8-10 attributes for each product.

Getting access to all that product information and manipulating it to fit the format of the shopping engines is a tough process. Many ecommerce providers, including Yahoo! Store, provide an automated data feed submission service, porting your product data to the shopping engines, but I recommend manually managing your feed or working with a data feed management company that stresses data feed optimization. While working through the automated data feed solution is a great first step, the data sent to the shopping engines doesn’t always meet the standards of those shopping engines. Or think of it this way, if everyone is doing the basics and you’re optimizing your feed, you’ll be ahead of the pack.

I’m not saying that this will be easy, but the good news is that the work you do to set up your data feed can benefit your company in other areas. For example, I’ve worked with many merchants that had access to Manufacturer Part Numbers (MPNs) and Manufacturer Names, but never included this data in their database/catalog because they saw no reason to put the information on their website. By forcing the merchant to include MPNs in their catalog, the merchant was not only able to send this out to the shopping comparison engines, but also publish this information on their website and therefore rank well for targeted search engine queries that include the MPN or Manufacturer Name. In other words, the information you use in your data feed can also be used for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.

Furthermore, data feeds with good titles, descriptions, and other attributes like catalog, color, size, age range, etc., are great for generating keyword ideas for PPC bidding (on Google Adwords/Yahoo! Search Marketing/MSN AdCenter). As opposed to just bidding on train set, you can big on [insert color] train set, [insert age range] train set, etc. Viewing an Excel spreadsheet with all the attributes in a structured format can help you come up with hundreds if not thousands of additional keywords/keyword phrases.

Brian Smith
Guest blogger for Yahoo! Small Business

stay tuned for part two: Getting Started with Shopping Comparison Engines