Advertising on Shopping Search Engines

Now that Thanksgiving is behind us and the U.S. has gorged itself on turkey and football, the official holiday shopping season has begun. Will online retailers benefit this year? If predictions from Forrester Research are right, online retailers stand to make out big time.

Forrester forecasts that online holiday sales from Thanksgiving to Christmas will grow by 42 percent over last year to $12.2 billion, buoyed predominantly by higher spending on products such as apparel, home decor and sporting goods. We hope you haven’t waited to take advantage of this holiday sales season, but if you need some help, we’re coming to your aid with some great information you can use now and off-season. (And if nothing else, use this information for your own shopping needs!)

Shopping Search Engines

Shopping-specific search is growing in popularity. A ComScore study shows that shopping search and comparison engines attracted 33 million unique visitors in October 2003 and total traffic to these sites rose 9 percent from the same time last year, making them one of the Internet’s fastest growing categories. Shopping comparison sites include MySimon, Shopping.com (formerly DealTime), BizRate, and PriceGrabber. Yahoo, Google, MSN and Ask.com too have been beefing up their shopping search services in preparation for the holiday season.

Shopping Search Engines and Product Comparison Sites

Yahoo Shopping: Inclusion in Yahoo Shopping is done on a pay-per-click product feed system. Yahoo Shopping’s product feed requirements is a .txt file that includes product name, description, SKU code, product URL, price and other information dependent on product category.

CPC fees on Yahoo Shopping depend on the categorization of your product, not the price of the product. For example, apparel and book listings cost $0.19 per click, while flowers and diamonds are $1.25 per click. Yahoo Shopping lists all prices at https://productsubmit.adcentral.yahoo.com/sspi/us/pricing.

Shopping.com: Formerly DealTime, Shopping.com is a high-traffic online shopping search engine that claims “over half of online shoppers use the Shopping.com network.” The network also includes DealTime UK and ePinions, a consumer rating site. Like Yahoo Shopping, Shopping.com uses a CPC model for its merchant program with fees ranging from $0.05 to $0.30 per click, dependent on the category. Detailed rate information at http://merchants.shopping.com.

BizRate: BizRate merchants control which categories their products appear in the and to which target markets their listings are shown. BizRate’s Merchant Listings Program operates a more advertiser-driven fee market. Merchants can pay the base CPC price or bid higher for more high profile listings. Minimum bids start at $0.10 per click; office supplies and electronics top the bids at $0.30 CPC. Rate card info at http://cache.bizrate.com/pdf/OA_ratecard.doc

PriceGrabber:PriceGrabber has two programs to assist sellers in reaching shoppers. Merchants can participate in a CPC-based program. Costs vary from product category to category. For more information: http://www.pricegrabber.com/about.php/about=corporate

Sellers without their own e-commerce site can list products for sale through PriceGrabber Storefronts, a commission-based program. Currently, the rate is 7.5% of the sale price for transactions more than $15.00; for transactions less than $15.00, the fee is $1.00 per sale. For more information: http://www.pricegrabber.com/home_storefront_help.php/opt_type=10

MySimon: MySimon was one of the first and most popular shopping comparison sites to launch. MySimon is currently owned by CNET and offers CPC listings as well as site and category sponsorship opportunities. More information at http://www.cnet.com/aboutcnet/mediakit/marketing/programs.html?tag=ft

Froogle: Unlike most other shopping engines, Google’s Froogle (pronounced “frugal” and still in BETA development) does not require merchants to pay to have their products listed. Froogle may have already automatically indexed your site, but if it’s not submit your data feed. For more information on Froogle and setting up your listing, see http://froogle.google.com/froogle/merchants.html

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