Improve Results and Increase Sales and ROI in Comparison Shopping Engines

Hello eTaildTail community.  First of all thank you all for your emails and questions. I hope that I have been able to answer some of your questions in a manner that helps you better utilize comparison shopping engines and other marketing shopping destinations. 

Going into the weekend, I thought I would leave you with 5 tips to improve performance, and ROI, when using these marketing channels.

1. There are over 150 shopping destination channels that I know of which you can use to market your storefront.  Some are large, general, and well known channels, as Amazon.com, eBay, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, Shop.com, Pront.com, and PriceGrabber while others are smaller, general players, such as SortPrice.com, Become.com, myCoupons.com, Smarter.com, and PriceForSure.com and others are niche sites as Healthpricer.com, BobVila.com, HGTV.com, Cooking.com, GolfPricer.com, GourmetFoodMall.com, ToolCrib.com and many others. 

They all can lead to sales and many of them can work for you but you need to test which channels work best for your product catalog and manage each channel as you would separate marketing campaigns.  I recommend testing several channels and, after 3-6 months, compare each channel against the other and then only work with those that perform best for you. (Q: How? A: Use an analytic tool)

2. Improve the quality of each feed to each shopping channel by filling in all of the required fields that the shopping comparison engine requires. Then, update those fields weekely to ensure that these marketing feeds reflect the data that resides in your shopping cart technology.  This means cleaning up fields, especially where possible redundancy occurs, and defining new items accurately and thoroughly. In other words, make sure you map each shopping channel competely to the comparison shopping engines required taxonomy so that they can list your products accurately throughout their shopping comparison engine.

3. Make sure that the data feeds your are managing to each comaprison shopping engine, or shopping marketplace, reflect exactly the inventory and products that you are selling online. If you delete a product on your shopping cart, or run out of inventory, ensure you have a system in place that will "automatically" update these changes in the data feeds you are managing for each shopping channel. DON'T rely on doing it manually, as you will make mistakes and probably forget to make the "global" changes needed in each product catalog data feed file you are sending to multiple comparison shopping engines.

4. Manage each comparison shopping engine and marketplace differently.  They are unique channels that perform differently which requires that you create a separate data feed for each channel from which to market from on a weekly, if not daily basis.

5. Understand the economics of each comparison shopping engine and the options they offer to ensure that you manage to the highest ROI possible when using that channel.  Shop.com now givs the online merchant options to work on a commission or cost-per-click basis, JellyFish allows the merchants to set the "cash-back discount" they want to give a consumer for each product, SortPrice gives you a flat fee option per month, myCoupons.com gives you a flat "cost-per-redemption" model, theFind.com is free all around and now has introduced a CPC pricing model and Amazon.com is incredible but can charge large commissions for credited sales, so ensure that you are feeding products to them that are in line with the margins you can afford to give up.

Working with comparison shopping engines can be incredibly lucrative but you will need to do some work.  I think it is fun, especially when you see the sales roll in!

Oh yeah, I almost forgot:

Bonus Help: FEED IMMEDIATELY to 3 free comparison shopping engines: Google Shopping, theFind.com, and MSN LIve Search. You can only win and pay nothing, ever!

Have a great weekend.

-- Chip

Comments

[Asa Zanatta, HealthPricer]

Chip, this is an excellent list. I'd like to add a couple of points.
1. pay attention to the business model each comparison shopping engine uses - Pay Per Click (PPC) or Pay Per Action (PPA). It makes a big difference as to how many products you display.
2. if you don't know much about a specific comparison shopping engine - do your research. Make sure they are reputable and 'real'. We recently came across a case of serious plagiarism of our site, www.healthpricer.com. If interested, you can read more about it at blog.healthpricer.com.

[Chip Arndt]

Asa,

Thanks for the comment and if you guys want to write a blog entry about things like this...let me know.

Have a nice weekend,

Chip