Comparison Shopping For Beginners
Comparison shopping engines are websites that display product listings in an way that allow searchers to browse, compare, and research multiple products before deciding to which to buy. There are several large comparison engines - here’s a few - Shopzilla.com, NexTag.com, and PriceGrabber.com. Everyone seems to have a comparison shopping engine these days - AOL, MSN, Yahoo, CNET, etc. The larger sites combine every category imaginable and provide search across all of them, but there are smaller niche comparison shopping engines that focus on a single category or product, like lenspricecompare.com, who compare contact lens prices. Some shoppers may use several shopping engines before finally deciding to make a purchase.
Where does the content on these sites come from?
Comparison engines receive data from any number of merchants, like bestbuy.com and target.com. Typically, it doesn’t matter how many products you sell to get listed on the shopping sites. In some cases, like Amazon.com, you don’t even need a website to sell your products. Merchants are usually required to submit a data feed that contains a list of every product they want to advertise along with other bits of information about those products. Some shopping sites ( HealthPricer.com ) have the ability to spider a website to gather content, so there is no need to submit a feed. I personally prefer submitting a feed rather than having my site spidered. The reason is that the spiders can sometimes pick up some weird text from the code of your site, which may cause your product titles and descriptions to look like they were written by a very young child. Submitting a data feed also give you more control over the data, for instance, maybe you want to use a different title or a different description than the one you use on your site.
How much does it cost?
The theme amongst the majority of shopping sites is pay per click (PPC), but some do operate on a pay per action basis (PPA), or simply a static fee for inclusion. Some sites are even FREE –> Google Product Search. CPC prices can vary, but if you have ever managed a PPC campaign you got a pretty good idea how it works. These are not “set it and forget it” campaigns. Do that and you’re likely to fail. Tracking sales back to the click is important so that you can determine which products are not converting and then remove them from that particular data feed. If you don’t have the ability to track sales, some of the shopping engines offer a tool to do it for you. More will be discussed about this at a later time.
Should you submit a product feed?
It depends. What are you selling? Do you have a well-known brand? Is your product so niche that nobody even knows it exists? Are your competitors advertising on shopping engines?
Depending on how you answered the those questions you could really benefit from submitting your products. It is especially important to submit data feeds if you are selling products in a competitive market and/or where prices are set by the merchants rather than by manufacturers. Merchants will fight to offer the most enticing deals to remain listed near the top of the search result pages.
If you decide to submit, the obvious first submission should be to Google…..again it’s free and can deliver some excellent traffic! After that you can submit to one of the larger PPC shopping engines if you have some marketing budget available, but carefully track costs and sales so you know which are making you a profit and which are just a waste of money. Different shopping engines can attract different types of shoppers.
How do you submit a feed?
First you need to export your product database to data feed format (typical file types are .txt, .csv, and .xml). Then you should look at which shopping engines you would like to submit to. Some shopping engines may have a special formatting requirement for their feed, while others may accept feeds created for different shopping sites. I believe NexTag.com gives you a choice to submit a feed that is already formatted for a different engine.
You should update your feed as often as you update the products on your site. You don’t want customers calling about a sale you ran 6 months ago or clicking on a link to a product that is no longer available on your site (most likely a 404 error page). This could mean updating your feed on a daily basis or it could be as long as a month or more before it’s necessary. Some sites, especially Google, require a feed be sent every 30 days regardless of whether the feed has changed. There are ways to automate the process and will be discussed later.
Moving on
Now you know a bit about comparison shopping engines and hopefully are ready to start submitting your data feeds. Stay tuned for recommendations on starting the data feed submission process.
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Thanks for the article.
We are a new company selling electronic cigarettes & i believe that shopping engines could be a profitable way of getting our product to market.
Will heed your advice and start with google (better the devil you know)…
Your site is definitely worth bookmarking! :)