Cut the Fees!

by Brian Smith, on October 2nd, 2005

One reason there are less merchants on NexTag or Shopping.com (for example) than AdWords or YSM is that data feeds are more difficult to create than AdWords and YSM ads. Want another reason? Fees. I have a feeling that small business are so used to an initial fee of $5 on AdWords or $30 on YSM, that they probably hesitate when signing up for the shopping comparison engines.

Here are the initial deposit requirements of a sampling of shopping comparison engines:
PriceGrabber: $500 – $1000
Smarter.com: $100
Shopping.com: $100 – See recent post
Shopzilla: $100
NexTag: $150

When I talk to merchants who are listed exclusively on Froogle, they say it’s because Froogle is free and as a small business, they can’t afford to list on the other comparison engines. Small businesses aren’t always the most savvy of marketers…if they are selling products online at a profit, most likely they could afford a per click fee on a targeted site and at the very least, they should test out marketing on shopping comparison engines. But if AdWords and YSM have shown them that marketing online should only cost $30 or less to start and Froogle has shown them that comparison engines can be free (no deposit, no click fees) then an initial deposit of $100+ is not going to sit well with small merchants.

So why the large initial deposits?

Tags: Comparison Engines


Preston Wily said

I couldn’t agree more – it is extremely short-sighted of the comparison engines to nickel and dime small businesses when they are first setting up their account. If they really have faith in their product they should be giving away free advertising (like Pricewatch does for 1 month) to get advertisers hooked. The real money comes when the channel has been proven and the marketer can open up their wallet.

October 3rd, 2005 at 7:31 am |

Comparison Engines » Blog Archive » Shopping Comparison Engine Fees - Revisited said

[...] k ago I wrote about the start up fees of some of the shopping comparison engines. In that post, I stated that Shopping.com’s (SDC) minimum initial deposit (which goes towards clicks – there [...]

October 9th, 2005 at 3:20 pm |

Joe said

Shows businesses are committed to using the channel. If there was no fee, these comparison engines would be wasting alot of time with merchants who are not concerned about quality. If the fee is too much, it probably means that the merchant is not of a size to handle a real user base that may be driven over by the increased traffic that the CE deliver.

October 25th, 2005 at 3:13 pm |