Comparison Shopping SitesFrom a consumer perspective online comparison shopping sites are great. They allow shoppers to quickly see products with prices for multiple online retailers all on one screen. It's no wonder that they have increased in popularity in the last couple of years. The 2006 holiday shopping season will no doubt bring more shoppers to those sites than ever before.
The major players in the comparison shopping space are Shopzilla, Yahoo Shopping, Shopping.com, NexTag, Google Base, and PriceGrabber.com. It's completely free to list products in Google Base which makes it a no-brainer. The other sites charge merchants on a pay per click basis. The minimum click charge varies depending upon the types of products a merchant is selling, which typically ranges from $.10 to 1.00. Merchants can spend more to get higher listings.
If a merchant has a professional looking store that yields a solid conversion rate, these pay per click channels can be lucrative. The key is measuring the success from each marketplace. If a merchant spends $500 on clicks at Shopping.com which results in $5000 in sales, the merchant need only have a 10% profit margin to break even. If the merchant's profit margins are closer to 20%, the merchant would see a 100% return on investment – not bad! Merchants that don't measure their return are bidding in the dark and essentially rolling the dice. With online marketing, there is no need to market blindly.
Each comparison shopping site accepts data in a different format which can make getting data into the comparison engines difficult. However, there are ecommerce platforms available that will create data feed files for the merchants for each marketplace. There are also ways to automate the data feeds for Yahoo Shopping, Shopping.com, and Google Base to ensure product listings are up to date.
Search for the comparison shopping brands on Google Trends (www.google.com/trends) and one will notice that there is consistently a spike in queries for the comparison sites during the holiday season. As the holidays approach, online merchants serious about capitalizing on holiday orders should make sure their accounts are setup and that their data feeds are working for the comparison shopping sites.
