As I mentioned at the beginning of the year, one of my goals for 2006 is to focus more on merchants and start to help the 5000 or so retailers which actively submit datafeeds to the leading shopping comparison enignes…not to mention the 50,000? or so retailers which submit datafeeds to Froogle/Google Base.

First up, Evogear. If you need any ski/snowboard equipment or gear, make sure to visit the site.

Background
The employees at Evogear are “aware, ambitious, and anti-not funny,” as they state on their website. Evogear was started as a way for its founder, Bryce Phillips, to support his love of skiing. Bryce began as an eBay seller but has now expanded to traditional internet marketing and even opened up a physical store in Seattle about 6 months ago. The company currently has just over 30 employees.

I met Nathan Decker, Evogear’s Director of eCommerce, at eTail. He went into the consulting world right after college then hooked up with Bryce, an old friend from college, in 2002. Nathan has P&L responsibility for SEO, PPC, and the comparison shopping channels. eBay is still a component of the business and a colleague is responsible for that channel (as well as other 3rd party distribution sites such as Amazon and Overstock).

What are your responsibilities?
I work on SEO, PPC, shopping comparison engines and any new programs. I also look at site conversion and the functionality of the website. We’re building out a couple new positions, but right now I’m the only full-time resource.

In general, what works and what doesn’t?
The comparison engines are working the best in spite of less than ideal execution. Basically, it’s really difficult to manage a PPC campaign with all the keywords we’re trying to target. It’s hard to stay on top of all our Google Adwords campaigns, making sure the marketing copy is relevant to the landing page, etc. Because of this, the conversion and ROI has been much better on the shopping comparison engines. It’s promising because we’ve been doing a mediocre job at best in getting things up and running. A simple search for a product we have on Shopping.com, for instance, will return results where our products are named inconsistent with common conventions, categorized wrong, pricing is not updated, etc., but it’s still working because you can do a mass feed.

How will you allocate your time?
Over half my time will be spent on the comparison engine feeds – I need to spend a lot of time to get the infrastructure and software in place. We need to develop consistent scheduling of feeds in addition to a process or an automated way of prerparing feeds for each engine. I am considering outsourcing this option. Once that’s set, I’ll work on more organic and PPC. We already outsource some of our organic and are in discussion to outsource our PPC as well.

What shopping comparison engines do you advertise on?
Froogle, Shopping.com, Yahoo! Product Submit, Become, and Shopzilla.

How many products do you list?
Roughly 1300 SKUs which represents over 10,000 unique items given many SKUs have several sizes or colors.

What category do you usually fall into?
Sports & Outdoors, Sporting Goods. Sometimes it’s difficult to categorize because a site like Shopping.com doesn’t have very detailed categories.

How much do you spend per month on the shopping comparison engines?
Under $10k/month.

What percentage of your online sales come through the shopping comparison engines?
35-40%

What resources do you have to help you? How are the feeds created and submitted?
We have an IT department made up of 2 people & a part-time consultant. They produce the 1 feed which is pre-configured for Froogle. It’s dropped in a network folder in a .CSV format, and I have to add the campaign codes – we amend each destination URL with a code so when the user clicks through to the landing page it’s properly tracked by our analytics software, WebSideStory. I have to go through this process for every shopping engine.

How long does it take to create a feed?
It takes roughly 45 mins to turn [the Froogle feed] into the Shopping.com feed. All of them take roughly 45 mins to create, but sometimes they don’t upload correctly. If you add all the time spent, it’s roughly 1.5hrs per shopping comparison engine every week or every other week.

Do you add your logo, phone number, etc.?
So far, there’s my feed and that’s it. We have not done extensive optimization. That’s one of the things I plan to work on. We’ll track and measure [these additions] and make sure it’s worth the extra amount.

What type of relationship do you have with the engines (talk to them frequently/self serve)?
100% self serve aside from Become.com, and they’ve been awesome – Colin at Become has been very proactive about helping us. I mostly work with him through email, but we’ve talked on the phone a couple times.

Rank the engines. Which engine works best? Why?
Froogle has been the best; it’s driving the most traffic and best conversion. It’s also free which doesn’t hurt. Conversion on Froogle is better by a pretty significant factor compared to the rest of the shopping comparison engines. This is partly because our automated feed is set up for Froogle. The second is Shopping.com – the traffic seems more targeted than some other comparison engines. The other ones would all be about the same.

What don’t you like about the engines? How could they do better?
It seems like it might be in their best interest to come up with a unified master taxonomy so [a retailer] could generate one feed and spit it out to all of them. That’s definitely a big gripe that I have. It would allow me to [optimize all the other information] and get a couple steps ahead of everyone else. Mainly it would be best for the consumer, which is good for everyone.

A proactive account manager would be awesome; someone to help me do a better job much faster. Even someone to just say, ‘dude, your feeds are screwed up.’

All the shopping comparison engines seem to have reviews [that purchasers are asked to fill out]. It’s a good idea, and I like the fact that customers have more information on vendors, but the problem is that we already have a whole survey mechanism in place. I want to have the Shopping.com survey available to our Shopping.com customers but then our customers would be subjected to two surveys.

What do you like about the engines? What are they doing right?
All your competitors are there so you have to be there. They are sending targeted traffic – people have already parsed through information, so if you can offer a great value, you’re going to win the customer. It’s pre-targeted, shoppers already know what they want [when they get to your site].

Do you see the shopping comparison engines as stealing your customers?
The good thing is that you’ve gained the customer information. If you deliver and do a good job, if you communicate your brand through the purchase cycle, you can maintain that customer relationship. It’s an opportunity you have.

Any recommendations for companies getting started on the shopping comparison engines?

Have an IT team very involved from the start with creating the feeds and mapping the data correctly. We should have done them all at once [as opposed to just working on the Froogle feed] as it would have been an easier project back then.

Consumers [on the shopping engines] are comparing you with competitors. You have to differentiate yourself. Price is going to be a huge factor, but price isn’t everything. The real leaders will find a way to add value besides just price.

Related Posts
-Merchant Interview – SewellDirect – March 6, 2006
-Data Feed Optimization