Shopping Comparison Sites Can Work for You

In today’s highly competitive eCommerce marketplace, the savvy online shopper rarely makes a purchase without doing a little homework first. To a consumer, there’s nothing more exasperating than spending $200 for an area rug and then stumbling across the same product for $50 less at another website. Of course, no-one has the time to visit hundreds of sites hunting down the lowest available price, which is why shopping comparison engines have become so widely popular. According to industry estimates, 68% of online purchases begin at a shopping comparison site or search engine, with only 30% of conversions originating from a direct visit to an eCommerce store.

The premise is simple—online merchants set up a feed of hand-picked products to the shopping comparison sites, which then accumulate all of the product information into a database and create a search index. When the consumer visits the shopping comparison site and does a search for, say, “golf clubs,” a search is performed against the database and returns a listing of all relevant matches. The consumer can then quickly compare their attributes. Different sites may fluctuate somewhat in their presentation and layout, but most will display such product information as price, product name, seller’s name, product image, and key selling points. Nearly all will provide the consumer with various sorting options, so they can shop by price, by brand, by rating, or by other parameters. A link is also provided, so the shopper can quickly hop to an online store to obtain more information or to purchase the featured item.

Benefits of Shopping Comparison Sites

• As a supplement to your pay-per-click advertising endeavors, establishing a presence on shopping comparison sites can provide a substantial revenue boost to your business.
• Many shopping networks present the consumer with post-sale surveys to gauge areas like product quality, customer service, and ease of shopping. The reviews are then displayed to potential future consumers, boosting your company’s credibility and giving you an edge over your competitors.
• Shopping comparison sites provide a highly cost-effective marketing mechanism, making them a good choice for smaller eCommerce vendors with limited budgets.
• You’ll enjoy instant access to a much larger volume of prospective consumers when you list inventory with a comparison engine. Plus, consumers will be presented with your product when they’re in a prime position to buy: they’ve just searched for exactly what you’re serving up, which greatly increases chances of conversion.
• Comparison sites allow widespread exposure and reinforcement of your brand identity, especially important for new eCommerce sites. Smaller online retailers will also benefit from appearing alongside major companies who would ordinarily overshadow the less prominent vendor.

Tips for Listing Your Products

While comparison sites are generally free for consumers, online retailers usually sign a contract stipulating an agreed-upon fee, most commonly based on the number of clicks your listing generates. When implementing this pay-per-click advertising model, there are several things to keep in mind to help maximize your ROI:

• Strive for uniqueness and variety. With the large number of comparison engines and the thousands of eCommerce businesses listing their products, the competition can be fierce. You’ll have a better chance of garnering clicks—and coveted conversions—if you list a broad mix of items with distinctive selling points.
• Once you’ve chosen which comparison sites to use, consider setting up an automatic XML feed. This scheduled transmission will convey the most up-to-date prices, product names, images, and other data to the comparison engines, ensuring consumers won’t be viewing outdated information.
• You can exercise some control over the priority ranking of your products based on how much you’re willing to pay for each click. An algorithm of bid amount per click, consumer ratings, and product price is used to determine how high your listing will appear within search results.
• Don’t go too low. Strive for fair, competitive pricing supplemented by superior customer service and value-adding product information. If you sacrifice too much of your margin by offering a rock-bottom price, your ROI will suffer.
• Create a conservative budget and realistic forecasts. Don’t expect your sales to triple within a month of activating your listings. Aim instead for a slow, steady increase that can be sustained over a long period of time.

Top Comparison Sites

While there are hundreds of shopping comparison sites on the Web, they vary widely in terms of the scope of their product offerings and the amount of value-adding information they include. There are some key players in the online comparison business that enjoy a large majority of retailer listings and consumer traffic.

Since its inception in 2003, Shopping.com has reigned as the country’s 4^th largest online shopping network. Owned by eBay, it attracts more than 20 million online shoppers each month. Bizrate is also a major competitor, with more than 40,000 online businesses listing millions of products. Another popular site is Shopzilla, which offers its merchants membership in its Customer Certified Ratings and Review Program. MSN Shopping offers merchants access to multiple advertising options. Other players include PriceGrabber, Google Base, Netzilla, NexTag, MySimon, and Yahoo!Shopping.

Each comparison site produces different results per industry, so we can’t blankly recommend one over the other. For example, we’ve seen apparel do very well with shopping.com, while not doing so well with Shopzilla. But we’ve also seen different results with different product types. So our suggestion is to try a number of them that you are considering for a few weeks and monitor your results, this will give you an indication of the most favorable shopping engine(s) for your website.

Shopping comparison sites provide an easy, cost-effective way for eCommerce retailers to get a hand-picked assortment of products in front of qualified online consumers. In addition to creating an advertising budget and realistic projections, it’s important to implement reliable reporting methods to measure the return on your investment. Make sure you are tagging all of your inbound links through each comparison engine so that you can track ROI through your analytics software. This is very easy to do, and extremely important in measuring the success of your online marketing dollars. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve worked with someone who wasn’t tracking their ROI and as soon as we started, we quickly realized that they were actually losing money on their campaigns. Yes, it can bring in sales, but at what cost? That is the key factor that will determine the success of your shopping comparison marketing.