And They Keep Coming…Might as Well Try Them = More Shopping Destination Sites

Well, so much has been written about the demise of shopping destination sites (comparison shopping engines, marketplaces, and other places to find and buy products) but then, we have new shopping destination sites popping up each week.  What gives?  www.eTaildTail.com is as confused as you are about all of this -- so send in your comments to tip@eTaildTail.com if you want!

I don’t know whether to believe the “industry experts” writing about the slow down in over all growth of online shopping each year or whether to just keep my mouth shut.  From my point of view, thinking as an online merchant, I don’t really care how many new online sites come online as their proliferation at least gives me an opportunity to list my products and have increased exposure/relevancy across search engine searches. And with the kids using phones to do everything under the sun and the growth of mobile commerce is it really all that doom and gloom?

And the good news about any of these new and “older” shopping destination sites is that if they are not working for you – stop using them and try another one.

So I am here to report on a few new ones that have come to my attention this week.  They are:

CozyBug.com: an online marketplace offering consumers and businesses an easier, safer way to buy and sell locally with zero shipping fees.  CozyBug.com is a niche site focused on low-cost classified advertising and is ideal for sellers with items that are too large to ship, or for shoppers that prefer to examine and item in-person and online. 

The site is cool as it focuses on flea market items, garage sale type of stuff, furniture and appliances, and vehicles.    This site has the feel if a CraigsList meets eBay – you can create your own landing pages and actually build maps for folks to get to your products in person.  Check out the pricing for all of these services on their site.

i-Shop.com: well now we have another discount online shopping mall. They seem to be focusing on getting products right from the manufacturer to the consumer and their inventory is huge.  They are new to the marketplace and are marketing themselves as a small company that is helping small to medium sized businesses have a stronger online web presence.

Also don't forget www.PDQDeals.com, www.PriceForSure.com, www.SortPrice.com, and www.TheFind.com, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. For information on them go to the menu on the left hand side of this page and click in Comparison Shopping Engines.

I am unsure how they do this when they also say that they specialize in getting products direct from the manufacturer at “deep discounts.”  I have a call into them and will let you know what they say.  In the meantime, it may be worth to check them out as they are trying to help online businesses gain more exposure and if you are already feeding to a few shopping destination sites as Become.com, Smarter.com, PriceRunner.com, Yahoo! Shopping, Shopzilla.com, PriceGrabber.com etc….hey why not check them out, they may help increase sales and that ever so important SEO ranking.

By the way, if you are ever having issues feeding your data to any of these marketing channels, www.MerchantAdvantage.com launched a “Lite” version of their Channel Management with Chanalytics a few weeks ago at eBay Live 2007. The product is preconfigured to 25 online shopping destination sites out of the box and you can use it to feed and analyze your feeds to over 100 other shopping destination sites with a click of a button.

HELPFUL TIPS FOR THE DAY:

1. New shopping marketing/detination sites are popping up in the marketplace weekly and they might be good places to experiment with getting new sales leads, sales, and increasing brand awareness.

2. There are lots of sites to feed your product catalog to -- why not try them all? Or at least some of them? There are tools in the marketplace that help you do this easily and then analyze how your market feeds are performing so you leverage these many marketing channels.

3. Be sure, at the very least, to send your marketing catalog datalog data to Google Product Base, MSN, and theFind.com, as they are free.