Comments on: Recommendation for Yahoo! Product Submit and Yahoo! Shopping http://comparisonengines.com/2007/07/27/recommendation-for-yahoo-product-submit-and-yahoo-shopping/ Just another WordPress.com weblog Fri, 09 Dec 2011 18:27:04 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: colin http://comparisonengines.com/2007/07/27/recommendation-for-yahoo-product-submit-and-yahoo-shopping/#comment-1015 Fri, 27 Jul 2007 20:14:03 +0000 http://www.comparisonengines.com/?p=736#comment-1015 I agree that Y! Shopping is a subpar product… both front end and back end. For a CSE not to have click/cost/order/revenue reporting data and bidding on a product level, at this point, is absurd. However, I don\’t believe that the solution is to go free. A free service has an entirely too low barrier to entry. Anyone and everyone WILL signup. This includes spammers that bring a lot of noise and junk. This was the problem Google ran into with Froogle. It became a mess. They’ve spent ages trying to clean it up. Granted, a free service will benefit from comprehensiveness, but there will be no organization and a lot of junk.

In my opinion, instead of going free, they could offer a flat rate of 5 cents per click. 1) they would have the lowest rates of all the PPC engines 2) because advertisers still have to pay for their listings, albeit not much, it remains an incentive (that you don’t have w\ the free model) for them to provide good, optimized data in their feeds. Even a CPA model doesn’t provide much of an incentive for a merchant to provide up to date, clean data to a publisher… they’ve, more or less, got nothing to lose.

As such, if an engine was really considering going free, I would instead urge them to go for the minimal flat rate approach. Everyone will be happier.

As for the other engines that want to maintain their higher rates, I would still hope that someday they can take on the AdWords model: Get rid of the minimum category rates… let the market drive the price.

]]> By: psurplus http://comparisonengines.com/2007/07/27/recommendation-for-yahoo-product-submit-and-yahoo-shopping/#comment-1014 Fri, 27 Jul 2007 16:12:28 +0000 http://www.comparisonengines.com/?p=736#comment-1014 *applause*
You couldn’t have said it better. I want to quit using Product Submit everyday. There is no mechanism that can portray the value my organization receives from using it. I remember asking you before about where this product is going, and at least I haven’t been let down. I never really had that high of expectations if any to see any improvements to this Yahoo service.

I eagerly await any response from Y! on this.

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