Sr. executives at the shopping comparison engines, I have a little homework assignment for you:
1. Personally call up 5 (picked at random) of your mid-tier advertisers (the ones that spend $10K – $25K per month on your engine) and ask them how things are going. Remember to LISTEN. Ask them about their communication with account reps. Ask them about the level of service your engine provides relative to the other engines. Ask them if their account rep has ever called them up and offered optimization advice. Ask them if their account rep is helpful. Ask them how you can improve. Ask them about how they submit their feeds.
Where is this coming from? After reading David Pogue’s article this morning I had to say something. I’ve talked to way too many mid-tier advertisers recently which seem to have an antogonistic relationship with the shopping engines. And I’m not just talking about the ‘CPC rates are too high’ type complaints. These are serious customer service issues. The stories I’m hearing are starting to scare me. Please take the time to look into this.
Shopping.com’s customer service in the UK is the worst I have ever seen. They cannot be contacted by phone at all, out of about 15 web form contacts I have made I have only ever received 2 responses, both taking over 1 week.
On a marketing forum a shopping.com representative once posted asking for customer feedback, I spent about an hour putting accross my views about what they are doing right & wrong, I never got a reply, not even an acknowledgement that the person had read my email.
The last straw for me came recently when I noticed that shopping.com was bidding on my companies site name on Google Adwords. I was quite rightly outraged by this unethical practise, I couldn’t believe they were tapping into my existing customers and selling them to me for 30p a click! A week after the 3rd email, I got a terse response which basicly said that they were within their rights to do so and would not cease bidding on my site name. I immediately closed my account.
I will not be working with them again.
When we started HealthPricer.com (a Pay-per-Sale based comparison engine) we originally had data feeds, tracking-codes, cookie-settings and other requirements in place that we asked our merchants to implement in order to be able to get listed on our site.
We quickly realized that our success will not come with a merchant-hands-off approach and therefore established dedicated account managers for each of our departments, eliminated the need for data feeds and implemented a merchant-friendly crawling & normalization technology.
However the biggest impact came from working with our merchants and helping them directly improving their online conversion rates (which – obviously is in our own interests). By looking at and comparing the data across multiple merchants we were able to then come up with wire-frame recommendations that merchants could implement for a better user experience. This resulted in some of our merchants doubling their conversion rates.
In return by having regular feed-back sessions discussing performance and merchant statistics, our merchants help us putting our (advertising) focus on the right products.
To anon, unfortunately what you describe is a standard practice. I definitely have to agree with you, though, about customer service levels. I often get the feeling that the CSEs expect me to be grateful for the opportunity to be listed on their sites. They definitely aren’t looking at it as a partnership, if I’m not a huge retailer.
LBB: Agreed, luckily shopping.com were our worst converting marketing channel so it wasnt much of a bother to cut them loose. The only call we ever got from them was to ask us why we would let our account run out for a week before refunding it. We explained that if we are having bad cash flow then we can’t pay them, when I suggested that they give 30 days credit to established merchants I was told in a condescending tone that they only do that for large marketing agencies or ‘brand names’ like John Lewis or Argos. The cheek!
[...] es Friday, August 4, 2006 Brian Smith of Comparison Engines has pointed out that customer service at comparison shopping sites is terrible. No doubt th [...]
It’s actually funny that you say that, since I used to work at a CSE and the largest unpaid invoices/disputed accounts came from the large retailers and agencies. The medium-sized retailers were usually really good at paying their invoices. Huh. Bad policy?
I’ll tell ya who does communicate is PriceGrabber. I hear from my account rep directly on the phone.
Shopping.com, NexTag, Become, Google, Smarter, ShopZilla, PriceRunner… I’ve never received a call from these folks offering to help me.