More Sales Venues for Your Products

With the Christmas season coming soon, how can retailers roll out products that are seen by the widest possible audience -- without breaking the bank? Of course, take advantage of the targeted PPC advertising values on Overture.com (www.overture.com) and Google AdWords Select (http://adwords.google.com/select/main). However, as I was reviewing StoreFront software elsewhere in this issue, I came across two additional sources, especially designed for online store owners: DealTime and Infopia Marketplace Manager.

DealTime

DealTime (www.dealtime.com) is a free service designed to help shoppers compare prices at different online stores. It's free for shoppers, but online merchants pay for traffic on a PPC (pay per click) basis.

To try it out, I searched for a particular book by title. It was carried by six stores: AllDirect.com, TextbookX.com, Half.com, Powell's Books, Amazon.com, and 1bookstreet. The price varied from $5.60 to $8.99 -- surprisingly, the highest price was at Amazon.

DealTime allows searching in a wide variety of consumer product categories: babies and kids, books, cars, clothing, computers, electronics, flowers and gifts, health and beauty, home and garden, jewelry, movies, music, office, services, software, sports, toys and video games, and travel.

Each category has a minimum bid which varies from $0.08 for sports and fitness to 25 cents for books, electronics, office, and software. If you pay a higher amount you are ranked higher. DealTime receives your inventory and pricing data by either data feed or crawler. If you make pricing changes at DealTime, they are implemented 15 minutes later.

This shopping bot extends your store's reach to shoppers at AltaVista, Lycos, iWon, AOL, and Ask Jeeves.

There is no set-up fee to become a DealTime merchant if you use a data feed system (such as StoreFront BizPlaces employs). This could be in the form of a flat file of all your store listings. There is a charge if DealTime has to program a crawler to retrieve product information directly off your website.

You'll pay from $200 to $2000 by credit card in advance. Then you can choose to cap your advertising at a certain amount or have it automatically recharge your credit card when your limit has been reached.

Since most people using this kind of shopping bot are very price sensitive, you're likely to do better if you keep your prices slim. Other rankings are by store ratings.

The nice thing about DealTime is that the cost of entry is quite reasonable. If the system works well, you can renew it. If not, you can just let it lapse. For sites with competitive priced consumer products, this seems like a no-brainer.

Infopia Marketplace Manager

A quite different approach is used by Infopia Marketplace Manager (www.infopia.com). Rather than using search engines and portal sites like DealTime, Marketplace Manager helps you place your products and manage your bids on a variety of auction and marketplace sites. As you may know, trying to manage an array of products on several auction sites could keep you busy just keeping track of all the differences between sites and constant changes to policies. With Marketplace Manager you decide on which sites you want your products placed, and then Infopia handles the details -- for a fee.

First, you give Infopia product data, images, shipping options, etc. Product images are all hosted on Infopia's site. Within 2 to 10 days you'll be live on sites where listings are free, such as 4GreatBuys and Bidway. Once you and the staff observe how this is working for you, they help you set up a marketing budget and test out other sites such as eBay, Yahoo! Auctions, Amazon zShops, etc.

Monthly fees depend upon the package you select.

• Basic package includes up to 50 items for $99 per month management fee. However, the set-up fee of $149 covers the first 60 days, including a high level of support. Marketplace fees charged by the auction site are not included. The regular monthly fee includes basic e-mail support.
• Professional package covers to 500 items. Set-up fee of $299 covers the first 60 days. Then the fee is $299 per month. These merchants are assigned an account manager for increased support.

Marketplaces where Infopia can list and manage your products include: 4GreatBuys.com, Amazon Auctions, Amazon zShops, Alture - Catalog City, Bidway.com, CNET Auctions, eBay Network, eBay Stores, ePier, sell.com, uBid Network, Yahoo! Auctions, and Yahoo! Store. Each of these has their own fee schedules that are in addition to Infopia's monthly fee, though if you sell products through a storefront on their site, the fee is 5% of sales.

Services to merchants include a mailing list manager, coupon manager, integrated payment processing, order fulfillment tracking, inventory management, and consolidated sales reports and graphs.

Of course, you can place and manage your own products on these sites. But for the monthly fee, you may find it cost-effective to let Infopia do some of the grunt-work for you, freeing you to do other tasks required by your online store.