Advertising B2C Products with Shopping Comparison Bots

One of the ways retail consumer sites build traffic -- especially during the holiday season -- is through advertising with shopping comparison agents or bots. These include mySimon, BizRate, DealTime, Yahoo! Shopping, and PriceGrabber, and others. A new player, free for merchant, is Google's new Froogle service. Some shopping bots syndicate their listings to other portal sites, offering them a share in any advertising revenues generated. For example, DealTime provides data feeds to Excite Shopping and PriceGrabber powers the ZD Net comparison price display.

PPC Bidding

Several shopping bots operate on a PPC bidding approach, with higher bidders within a category appearing nearer to the top of the listing. Merchants that spend more money with a particular shopping bot may also be listed as a featured store and have their logo displayed.

mySimon (www.mysimon.com owned by CNet), for example, charges minimum PPC fees for different categories. At the low end (apparel, video games, books, flowers, home and garden, and toys) listings may cost the merchant 5¢ per click, while tech products such as laptops cost 75¢ per click. mySimon has three levels of sponsorship -- logo, bold text listing with highlighted background, and a text listing -- depending upon how large your advertising total is.

BizRate (www.bizrate.com) also uses a PPC model with a minimum deposit of $1,000.

DealTime (www.dealtime.com) states minimum bids for various categories. For example, clothing and accessories, 10¢ per click; computers, 40¢ per click; jewelry and watches, 25¢ per click.

Commissions

Other comparison shopping bots work use the eBay model where sales earn a commission. In fact, eBay (www.ebay.com), Yahoo! Shopping Auctions (http://auctions.shopping.yahoo.com), and Amazon zShops, Marketplace, and Auctions (http://zshops.amazon.com) could be considered a kind of shopping bot with product feeds, listing fees, commissions, and a huge audience of willing buyers.

PriceGrabber (www.pricegrabber.com), which powers comparison shopping at PC Magazine (Ziff-Davis) websites, Tucows, and AskJeeves, allows listing of new or used items by large retailers (merchant listings) and sales by individuals or smaller merchants without a website using the PriceGrabber Storefronts interface. For the latter, they charge no listing fee, but $1 for purchases up to $15 and 7.5% on purchase prices over $15. Additional fees are charged for hosting product images on PriceGrabber's site -- no charge if the image is hosted on your site. Logos next to an item cost $500 per month or 2.5% of the purchase price, whichever is greater. Fees owed to PriceGrabber are charged to your credit card. PriceGrabber's seven product categories are: computers, software, electronics, video games, movies, music, books, toys and office. Contact PriceGrabber about rates for merchant listings for items sold on your website.

Yahoo! Shopping (http://shopping.yahoo.com) is one of the largest online shopping destinations. Shoppers on this system can use a single shopping cart, even though they may purchase items from several different stores during their visit. Yahoo! Store owners can opt into this system for a 3.5% revenue share on products driven by the Yahoo! network. Many smaller businesses keep a Yahoo! Store just to take advantage of the considerable traffic driven by Yahoo! Shopping.

Google's Free Froogle (beta)

Froogle (www.froogle.com) is a play on the words "Google" and "frugal" (meaning "thrifty) and is Google's new entrance into the comparison shopping field. For the present, this service is free to merchants. Google hopes to make their money from sponsored links that appear to the right of Froogle search results. When shoppers click on a Froogle listing, which includes an image of the product, it takes them directly to your online store where the transaction is completed.

Some larger stores are listed in Froogle already by being crawled by the Google engine. If your store is not listed, you can be listed in Froogle (http://froogle.google.com/froogle/merchants.html) by getting approval, then FTPing a tab-delimited data file at least monthly. For help with this see the Froogle Feeder tool (www.wilsonweb.com/afd/frooglefeeder.htm). This helps you set up a data feed file in the proper format for uploading to Froogle. Fields include product URL, name, description, price, image URL, category, and ISBN (if applicable). You could set up your file in a spreadsheet or database, and then export using Froogle's designated format. However, Froogle Feeder makes it easy to get started.

Hint: Froogle allows up to 1000 characters for a product description, though the first 130 to 150 characters are all that are displayed in this listing. Make sure the basics of your product description appear in the first couple of sentences, though Google uses keywords in the entire description field to match user queries to your product.

Data Feed

Data gets to shopping bots in various ways. Most provide a system for uploading product data files. For an extra fee, some will write a script that regularly crawls your website and automatically extracts up-to-date product information.

The Bottom Line

I think that most shopping bots now price their services at a level that small business merchants can afford. Are they better than PPC listings with Overture and Google? Those who use shopping bots for price comparisons are definitely looking for products to buy, though they may be more price conscious than search engine shoppers. If you are a B2C store, I encourage you to try both PPC search engine advertising and shopping bots to drive traffic to your product pages. Use tracking to keep a good handle on the cost per sale using various ads and bots. You may find that shopping bots are one channel you'll use to increase the volume of sales in your store.

If you don't do anything else, at least try Froogle for free, using the free Froogle Feeder tool. I am. (Say "free Froogle Feeder" five times fast!)