Thinking About Shopping Comparison Engines:Part Two

March 13, 2007 | In Marketing/Promotion |

This post comes to you courtesy of Brian Smith. In the first post of this two-part article, Brian talked about concerns merchants may have with shopping comparison sites. In part two Brian discusses how to get started with shopping comparison engines.–Paul

Step 1: Make sure you’re ready to track everything. Yahoo! Store provides basic analytics through the “References”’ link under “Statistics”. You might also consider upgrading to analytics packages like Google Analytics, WebTrends, or Coremetrics.

Step 2: Sign up with the shopping comparison engines. Start with Google Base (it’s free) and then add: Yahoo! Shopping, NexTag, Shopping.com, PriceGrabber, and Shopzilla. There are many other shopping engines, but working with these six will give you a good idea of how the marketing channel performs. Think of this as a test. Spend at least $100/engine in order to collect the data you need to make informed decisions going forward.

Step 3: Set up your data feeds. You can start with an automated data feed submission program, but realize that this feed must be optimized to get great results. To use the Yahoo! Store automated feed, you’ll need to enable the export of the feed. To do this, click the “Search Engines” link under Promote in the Store Manager and click the radio button next to “enable” in the Export Store Content section. When you sign up with the engines, they will ask you if you want them to grab this XML feed. When you sign up for Google Base, the system will instruct you to sign up for their Google Base Store Connector service.

As I explained earlier, though, using these automated solutions is just a first step. You don’t just put up a website and expect Google and Yahoo! to rank you #1 for all of your products. You don’t just put up an ad on Yahoo! Search Marketing or Google Adwords and expect to get all the clicks and all the sales. Working with data feeds is no different. The most basic data feed optimization tip is to include as much data as possible in your data feed. Don’t just submit the minimum basic requirements or else your products won’t be found by shoppers browsing or searching.

Step 4: Analyze your results and refine your data feed. Some products will sell well on the shopping comparison engines. Some won’t. You will want to make sure you’re only listing the products that sell or you’ll rack up click costs producing a terrible return on investment.

Brian Smith
Guest blogger for Yahoo! Small Business

Brian Smith 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.

Update: 3/22/07–Internet Retailer posted an interesting story related to this topic about how LampsPlus is setting a minimum ROI threshold below which certain products are not fed to the shopping engines. This really ties into step 4 listed above and may actually be something you want to consider prior to submitting your feed. Read more.

6 Comments »

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  1. Shopping comparison sites are great if you are the lowest price - or the second lowest prices and the cheaper site looks lousy or untrustwothy.
    The idea is to pick and choose your battles, list where you will win the price wars. Remember that the shopping sites are “shopping sites” made for shoppers, not “selling sites” made for sellers.

    Comment by Ken — March 13, 2007 #

  2. There’s no such thing as a selling site made for sellers.

    Comment by Rick — March 14, 2007 #

  3. Ken

    I agree with your point about picking your battles–that is the key to being successful using this channel. Failure to do so can result in a lot of advertising spend with little return. SEO in this sense stands for Shopping Engine Optimization.

    I do not agree that SCEs are only great for products with the lowest price–that seems partially true but an oversimplification. Keep in mind that shoppers consider not just product price but also shipping and tax to get to a final cost. So the low price merchant may get a click on a product that only leads to an abandoned cart due to high shipping costs whereas another merchant with a slightly higher price may get the click and the sale due to more competitive shipping costs or a host of other non-price related reasons (trust, brand, design, etc…).

    Paul

    Comment by Administrator — March 14, 2007 #

  4. I see little benefit here for sellers. Comparison sites benefit buyers only. I know when I’m buying I rarely abandon a cart after shipping is calculated. I am already on the lowest price. A small difference in shipping price is not worth the trouble to keep changing carts for the lowest charge. Not sure why this article is on a site for merchants.

    Comment by L Hayes — March 19, 2007 #

  5. Just as search engines are geared for people looking for information, shopping sites are geared for buyers looking for products/information. Merchants certainly know the value of being found in search engine results (traffic), both in the organic results and the sponsored results. The same is true for merchants listing products in shopping engines (qualified traffic).

    That is not to say shopping engines work for all merchants or all vertical markets. Clearly there are some markets where price is the only concern and commodity product sales (think digital cameras of a specific brand) typically go to the lowest price found. Also, even when the products listed may not be a commodity for which buyers comparison shop, the cost of goods for the merchant may not make it economical to spend for clicks on a shopping site. The point of the article is simply this: shopping comparison sites can be an effective channel for merchants and merchants should investigate them when it may make sense for their business.

    Paul

    Comment by Administrator — March 19, 2007 #

  6. the data feeds are crucial you always want to have up to date information. If your info is not up to date you will probably lose the sale.

    Comment by chris — December 11, 2007 #

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