Comparison Shopping Search Engines
In the latest issue of Catalog Age, our very own Heather Lloyd-Martin not only provides insight on advertising on shopping comparison sites, but she also manages to get her face on the cover!

Here's an extract...

“...one thing that's really cool is that the people looking to comparison shopping sites are looking for exactly what they need,” says Heather Lloyd-Martin, president/CEO of Bellingham, WA-based agency SuccessWorks Search Marketing Solution Director of Search Strategies, WebSourced Inc [yes, I edited that last part ;-)]. Any shoppers who come to your site via a comparison engine are in effect prequalified and should have higher conversion rates than other visitors.

Make a point of visiting the shopping sites yourself, suggests Lloyd-Martin, paying attention to the categories you click on, and looking at listings in categories you're interested in entering. From those findings, you'll know what you need when you're ready to start working with the shopping engine to maximize the reach of your listings.

Lloyd-Martin also recommends talking with other companies who use comparison shopping engines to gain a better understanding of how to streamline submitting data feeds and pictures and how to analyze ROI. “Get a hint of what you're up against and dealing with,” she says.

As to whether to go with free listings with comparison shopping sites like Froogle or paid sites like PriceGrabber.com, “everyone digs the free stuff,” notes Lloyd-Martin. Although free listings may not generate as many purchases as paid listings, the added revenue is money that cost you virtually nothing to earn.

Lloyd-Martin doesn't recommend using only free listings, however, because they may not provide a significant lift in sales. Instead, she advocates supplementing free listings with paid listings on other sites such as Shopping.com and Yahoo! Shopping.

Andy Beal | permalink | +marktd |