Shopping Agents for the Christmas Season
Web Commerce Today, Issue 16, November 15, 1998
More and more shoppers are using Shopping Agents or Shopping Bots that are found at popular portal sites. Agents search for products carried by participating merchants and return a sorted list of products and prices, often with an "order" or "more information" button to click through to the merchant. I predict that this as a trend for the future, as shoppers become overwhelmed by the sheer number of sites.
Here are some of the shopping agents I found. The last two seem especially interesting for smaller merchants.
Impulse Buy Network (http://www.impulsebuy.net/) During a 60-day trial, merchants pay 5% to 8.75% commission on sales. Currently on Yahoo! Shopping.
Junglee (http://www.junglee.com) is featured by Yahoo Travel and Visa Shopping Guide, HotBot, Compaq, Snap.com and G2net. Junglee is now owned by Amazon.com.
Excite provides links to paying merchants in various categories, as well as including CompareNet Interactive Shopper's Guide (http://www.compare.net) and a Product Finder powered by Jango (http://www.jango.com).
Two you really ought to check out this season to help you attract Christmas shoppers are:
mySimon (http://www.mysimon.com). This is a new start-up, and is currently accepting new merchants at no charge. This will get you a link in your consumer product category. They'll try to get you to upgrade your free listing to a logo for an additional fee -- and that could increase your traffic substantially. Adding products to their comparison database, however, is by their invitation only. At present, there is no commission on sales, so this could be an important marketing strategy for you.
Bottom Dollar (http://www.bottomdollar.com) is a shopping agent that webmasters from many sites can set up as their own "Shopping Channel" and be paid on a per-click basis. Merchants pay per click-through, currently 10 cents to 30 cents per click, depending on the category of products (with computer hardware at the higher end). "We try to set the cost-per-click at a rate that allows us to recruit more websites, that, in turn, will send more click-throughs to the merchant," says Bottom Dollar's Eric Wendelbo. "We have merchants listed with us that pay from $50 per month (25 to 30 click-throughs per day in response to a search) to several thousand dollars per month." Merchants can set a monthly limit with Bottom Dollar so they won't overspend their advertising budget. To get a qualified visitor who is interested in your products for 10 to 30 cents per click-through is a bargain, in my opinion. Merchants should contact Eric Wendelbo (eric@bottomdollar.com).
If these sound interesting, you might want to sign up now to take advantage of the Christmas buying season.
