What are Shopping Comparison Sites? Shopping comparison sites work as a product search engine.  Customers can go onto these sites and type in keywords to find the products they are looking to buy.  Shoppers can sort the results by price so they can find the lowest/best deal for the item. What’s in it for retailers?

• Increased brand visibility. Smaller retail brands will be listed alongside bigger, more well-known brands.  So instead of being over-shadowed by bigger brands, shop comparison sites put smaller retailers in a more equal footing with larger brands, increasing the chances that customers will choose to buy from smaller brands instead of just focusing on the brands that they’ve heard about. Also, for people who visit these shop comparison sites, price matters more than the brand name!

• Instant access to larger audience and potential customers.  Thousands of people visit shop comparison sites every day.  So if retailers list their products in one of the more well-known sites (i.e. Shopzilla, Bizrate, Shopbot), their products will instantly be visible to thousands of new potential customers, instead of just the few people who happen to stumble onto the retailer’s business website.

• Increased chance of conversion.  Customers visiting shopping comparison sites usually already know what they want to buy.  They know how much that item is, and they have selected your brand/site from a list of other retailers. That means there’s no need to go out of your way to convince people that they need what you’re offering—they’re coming to you!

Warning:

Shopping Comparison Sites aren’t for everyone! These sites are more beneficial to your business only if your products are competitively priced.  If your products are priced too high, then it is unlikely that people will choose to buy from you.  Also, if your brand philosophy is based on exclusivity, then shopping comparison sites won’t be ideal for you because price is more the focus than quality of the product/brand.

  So which shopping comparison sites should you use? How to maximize your success with shopping comparison sites: Before you apply to have your products listed, update your e-commerce site.  Make sure your products are displayed well (update photos, improve product descriptions, assign item numbers.  This is because many of these shopping comparison sites will review your current online presence during the application process.  By being as presentable as you can be, you will increase your chances of approval. Test Cost-Per-Click (CPC) prices to see if it’s a viable model for you.  Shopping comparison sites that have a CPC mode will charge you every time a shopper clicks on a product and is redirected to your website, whether they’re buying or not.  Usually you will be allowed to set a daily or monthly budget.  Plan carefully about which items you want to list and test it out for a few weeks.  If you’re not getting better results compared to the free shopping comparison sites, then you’re probably better off going for the free sites. It’s always a good idea to test a few sites out before you decide on whether or not to include shopping comparison sites into your marketing strategy.  So try a few out, compare your results for every site where your products are listed, and learn what’s working and what’s not. Pro Tip: One thing that you can’t do with popular search engines that you can do with shopping comparison sites is that you can “feature” your listing for an extra price.  When you “feature” your listing, your results will come before all of the other search results and will give you an increased chance to compete with the bigger retailers.     How to manage your inventory on shopping comparison sites more efficiently: There are some services out there that can help retailers manage their e-commerce much more efficiently.  ChannelAdvisor is one such service.  With ChannelAdvisor, you will be provided with an interface that allows you to monitor the activity of multiple channels.  So if you have products listed on more than one shopping comparison site, you can track the progress on all of those sites within your ChannelAdvisor interface. Services summarized:

• Feed management
• Feed content optimization
• Feed performance optimization
• Reporting and analytics

VersaFeed is another retailer-focused e-commerce solution that assists in optimizing your experience with shopping comparison sites. It helps you update your product listings on your shop comparison sites, and optimizes data feeds from your e-commerce site to the shopping comparison sites.  This will relieve you of the need to do it all yourself and ensure that your products will always get the maximum exposure.  The VersaFeed staff will also help analyze your market and recommend which sites to use, and also help you in listing your products onto those sites. Services summarized:

• Google Shopping Manager Suite
• CSE feed optimization
• CSE attribution tracking
• VersaFeed E-mail support

How Wishpond can help you get your products listed on Google Shopping: Wishpond helps you list your products onto Google Shopping and maintains your account to ensure that your product information is up-to-date.  We also help you create ad campaigns on Google (help you choose high-ranking keywords, setting optimal Cost-per-Click rates, and scheduling your campaigns).  All you have to do is send us the URL of your website and we’ll take care of the rest for you. With Google Product Listing Ads, you can promote your products on Google Shopping which is Google’s product search engine.  Google Product Listing Ads are optimized for products, so they include images, price, product title and the name of your store.   Sources: http://google.about.com/od/googlereviews/gr/productSearchRe.htm http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1879877,00.asp http://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.nextag.com http://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.pricegrabber.com