Account Setup – Shopping.com & Shopzilla

October 2, 2005

I went through account setup & feed submission for a number of comparison engines today. In all cases, I uploaded my feed through the account center interface. Here are a couple notes for Shopping.com and Shopzilla…

Shopping.com: Kudos on accepting Excel files rather than just .txt files (I know this is a minor point, but every little thing makes a difference). A note of advice… send out a welcome email to all new merchants. Maybe this only happens when my products go live, but when every other shopping comparison engine sends out a welcome email immediately, not having one from you is a little disconcerting. Also, once I set up the account and submitted my feed, the Merchant Account Center (MAC) said: “Not Live – Registration Complete”. How about explaining what that means…I assume it means that you’re reveiwing my account before making it live, but who knows? Finally, this could just be an error with the MAC (which I know is in BETA), but once I logged out of my new account, I couldn’t log in again…and because I didn’t get that welcome email from you, I now have no way to contact you.
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Leave a Comment » | Comparison Engines, Shopping.com, Shopzilla | Permalink
Posted by Brian Smith

Cut the Fees!

October 2, 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?

3 Comments | Comparison Engines | Permalink
Posted by Brian Smith

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