Several emails came in this week to eTaildTail with similar calls for help. They went something like this:
"Chip, I am not having success with some comparison shopping engines and I don't know what to do. Some cost me a lot and the ROI is not worth it. Help. Is there any way to use these sites cost effectively, even when I have limited resources and money?"
The short answer is YES! YOU DO!....ergo...please read onward.
Managing (some) Shopping Comparison Sites to Ensure Excellent Return on Investment
I have 1,000 reasons to work with marketing destination sites, as www.Amazon.com , www.eBay.com , www.Shop.com, and other shopping destination sites as www.Ciao.com, www.PriceGrabber.com, www.NexTag.com, www.Shopzilla.com, www.Shopping.com, www.PriceRunner.com, www.Smarter.com, www.PriceForSure.com, and over 50 others. The main issue to making these sites "work for you" is that they require daily upkeep and work by the online merchant -- just listing to these sites won't work very well.
When I looked further into who was sending me these email calls for help, I found out that many of the online merchants were smaller merchants who simply don't have the time, resources, or money to work with many shopping destination sites properly and, for lack of a better term, "figure them out."
No one ever said that just listing your products to marketplaces and comparison shopping engines will lead to sales and greater return on investment -- and whoeever did tell you that, disown them! LOL
Remember that dozens, if not hundreds, of other companies that sell similar products to you are also listing products to these shopping sites. So to ensure that these aforementioned shopping destination sites work well for you requires work and basic knowledge of their "taxonomies" and how these sites can work more efficiently for the online merchant (confused yet?)
At the end of the day, many comparison shopping engines/sites have made many, many online merchants a lot of money, but this usually only occurs when the merchant is willing to "work at" and "understand" the nuances of each comparison shopping engine/sites internal workings.
Most of my successful clients, as Carols Candy Corner (very small and very successful), Calloway Golf or ProFlowers, optimize their data, manage SKU level bidding on sites that support it, and monitor their shopping comparison sites every day to take advanatge of their internal methods to ensure that products get listed higher on their sites than their competitors. So what next?
After reading all of the above many small merchants say to me that they simply cannot justify the time or money it takes to manage their product catalog data feeds to ensure proper ROI and compete and they stop using any comparison shopping engine.
This is not the answer and let me tell you why.
[Special Note: Please keep reading, but if you want to understand my more in-depth thinking about this (beyond this blog) check out a free webinar I did a few weeks ago.]
you can <<<Down Load it Free Here>>>...okay back to my thoughts.
Start Small, Work Intelligently
I have a better solution for small to mid-sized businesses, start small and work with FREE shopping sites.
There are five shopping comparison sites that can help a small to mid-sized business without costing you a dime. They are either FREE or only charge you when a commission is made. To make things even better they are all easy to use and manage. So there is no reason not to list your entire product catalog to these sites. They include:
Free:
Google Product Search
MSN Live Search for products
theFind.com
Pay Per Sale/Pay Per Coupon Redemption (and really, really easy to use):
www.myCoupons.com and
www.JellyFish.com
The first group above are free to list to and any (yes any) leads or sale that comes to your site doesn't cost you a penny! So why not work with them?
If setting up a feed is complicated for you, use a tool based software to help you. www.MerchantAdvantage.com is one choice and only costs $145 per month all in. MerchantAdvantage does not charge the merchant any revenue share, transaction cost, or set up charge, so basically for $145 a month you get marketing on these three sites that have combined unique visitors of 85+ million a month....yes, 85+ million. You may not reach them all, but you will reach some!
Even if you get one sale a month, listing your products on these sites is cost-effective, as you also get branding (customers see your brand and can click over to your site), and you will eventually be found by general search engines, as Google and Yahoo!, thus helping your overall seearch engine optimization.
Basically there is no reason not to use these channels. The best part of all of this is that the online merchant also learns how comparison shopping sites work and can "experiment" with these free channels before using pay-per-click shopping sites or the more complicated marketplaces as Amazon or eBay.
The second group above are also easy to use and must use sites because you only pay when a transaction is made -- and the commission is small and controlled by YOU!
When working with www.JellyFish.com (owned now by MicroSoft, which is determined to drive traffic to their site) the merchant controls the amount of money you want to "give back" to the customer by changing the field that controls the amount "cash back" you would like a customer to recieve from you.
Since you are in complete control of the margin, how can you lose?
Furthermore, you can change this field whenever you want in order to reduce your price as compared to your competitor's or increase it if you feel that you are giving too much of your margin away. So do you see any reason not to work with JellyFish?
I see three great reasons to work with them:
1. Exposure (FREE)
2. Potential Sales (and only pay the commisson back to the customer you want), and
3. Complete control over your margin and subsequent ranking on their site.
www.myCoupons.com works in a different and equallly effective manner and has many loyal customers.
With www.myCoupons.com you can list your entire product catalog and never create a coupon OR create a "general coupon" for your entire site, let's say $5 off any purchase, or 10% off purchases totaling over $50.00, or, better yet, create individual coupons for each SKU/product all for FREE.
Basically you choose the method of marketing and subsequent coupon offer and myCoupons then charges a flat rate of $3.00 per redeemed coupon only. That means, they charge nothing to list, nothing if a potential customer clicks to your site and decides not to buy, and nothing for all of the exposure you could get by just being on their site.
Moral of Story
1. Don't be afraid to work with shopping comparison sites, there are ones that are free and you have no excuse not to be listed with them.
2. You can start small and work with free sites and easy to use Pay Per Sale/Pay Per Coupon Redemption sites, without sepnding a lot time and virtually no money.
3. Online marketing does not have to cost you an arm or a leg. You can list to any of these sites directly (I can put you you in touch with them directly) or, for as little as $145 per month, list to all of them and have an easy to use web-based, tool to manage and analyze these marketing campaigns for you (see www.MerchantAdvantage.com ). It is really that simple.
So the question is: Can you afford not to work with some comparison shopping engines?
Where else can you reach potentially 100+ million unique visitors per month easily and cost-effectively?
Have a great weekend!
-- Chip
I just wanted to thank Ryan Brown, Everest Software, for the accolade and recommendation from the recent Internet Retailer 2008 show in Chicago to utilize MerchantAdvantage and our cost-effective, Channel Management with Chanalytics Professional and Lite products.
