Preparing for a Shopping Engine Program

The first thing you need to know is: Which sites are shopping engines? See Figure 11.2 for the list of popular shopping engines compiled by Hitwise, an online competitive intelligence company. Review the programs of sites that drive significant traffic to their sites. It's the same concept as with general search engines; you need a decent level of site traffic to achieve a minimum sales volume to make it worth your management time. If you choose a small general or shopping search engine for a test campaign, you might not collect enough data to accurately determine how to improve sales from that campaign, or others.

Figure 11.2. The most popular shopping e ngines, as visited by U.S. Internet users for October 2003 (based on visits ), according to Hitwise. All sites listed include aggregations of related sites to provide an overall market share of visits.

Now I have to amend my first sentence in this chapter, about Google and Overture. Which shopping engine is #1 in the Hitwise chart? That's right, Yahoo! Shopping. Which giant portal acquired Overture? Right again, Yahoo! So, although Overture is not directly playing in the shopping engine space, their new parent company, Yahoo!, is. Regarding Google, in December 2002 the company launched Froogle, a search engine that identifies web pages with only products for sale. At the time of this publication, companies can become Froogle merchants and submit a data feed for free. What?! There's something free in the search engine space? Yes, but once Froogle is no longer in beta testing this opportunity may disappear. Act quickly.

Important

Competition is fierce in certain product categories on comparison shopping engines. Because similar items sold by different merchants are placed side-by-side, consider creating a special promotion for shopping engine campaigns to draw a higher number of clicks and subsequent orders for your products.

Speaking of free, some shopping engines allow merchants to submit their products for free and then take a transaction fee. Merchants who want to enhance their listing position within a category can often buy advertising, generally on a cost-per-click basis.

As is to be expected, certain groups of products sell better than others. In interviews with shopping engines PriceGrabber.com and Shopping.com (formerly DealTime), top-selling items include computers, electronics (such as digital cameras and DVD players), video games , movies, books, music, apparel, jewelry , and photography. Your items don't fit into these categories? That's not necessarily bad. Perhaps you'll win a higher percentage of shoppers if your products fall into less-competitive categories.

Questionnaire for Prospective Merchants

Each shopping engine has different requirements for its merchant partners . Use this basic questionnaire as a guide in your initial conversations with a merchant account representative. Check their web sites, because many post extensive information about their merchant programs online.

1. What are the fees involved (setup, sales commission, ad listing enhancements)?

2. Do I have to maintain monthly minimums to continue being a merchant?

3. Can I set a maximum spending limit?

4. At what volume of item listings, or transaction levels, do you offer merchant discounts ?

5. How do you handle the merchandise transactions and what do you need from me?

6. Do you have a shipping policy for merchants?

7. How can I remove listings for products that are not available or no longer offered ? How quickly is the listing removed?

8. How is product information submitted (do I provide it as a data feed, or do you crawl my web site)?

9. What information do you need in the data feed, or what will you extract from my site?

10. How long will it take for my product listings to appear?

11. Will my product listings appear on any of your partner sites, and if so, which ones?

12. How do I manage my merchandise?

13. Do you offer customer testimonials on your site?

14. Do you offer any type of performance reporting?

15. Will you sign an agreement to not market my trademark names in the search engines? (Read Part VI, "Protecting Your Profits," to determine if this is a concern for your company.)