Catching up with Sortprice – Flat Rates + Facebook App

by Brian Smith, on March 18th, 2009


The economy stinks, which means a lot of merchants are cutting back.  In some cases, this means completely pulling a marketing channel.  More often than not, even if the shopping engines are a ROI positive channel, I think that they could quickly end up on chopping block.  Even after being around in their current state for 5+ years, the shopping engines still haven’t made it easy for merchants to get up and running and succeed.  Google AdWords is the gold standard for ease of use, flexibility, level of traffic, quality of traffic, and technology.  So when a merchant looks at the time needed to succeed on the shopping engines and remembers the pain they went through because one of their product listings was featured on a syndication partner and got $3000 worth of ‘curiosity’ clicks in one day, it’s no wonder that a big red line goes through shopping engines.

But wait.  Assuming that you have some resources at your disposal, take that pain and frustration and channel it into a positive experience on free, no cost, and low cost shopping engines.

Sortprice is in the low cost category.  As opposed to its bigger bretheren, Sortprice does not charge the normal PPC fee, but rather a flat monthly rate (the company also has a free program to get merchants started).  If the merchant gets 5 clicks or 1000 clicks, the merchant still only pays the flat monthly rate.  Less risk.  Less stress.  Not a bad thing when everyone is telling everyone else to slash costs.  And while the traffic and resulting sales will not make your business, it’s not going to hurt it either.  At least worth a test.

And if the flat rate isn’t enough of a selling point, you can use Sortprice as an entry point into Facebook.  Sortprice creates a free version of your store on Facebook…maybe you’ve heard of that site…gets a bit of traffic.  Anyways, there have been no runaway successes in the ecommerce app space on Facebook, but Sortprice’s application is an easy way for a merchant to dip their toes into the Facebook waters.  Merchants basically get a replica of their store on Facebook.  Then they can link to it from their profile pages and spread the word.

CajunGrocer and Evogear on Facebook:

Tags: Comparison Engines


Will Johnston said

So, does this mean that there is an opportunity for those using CSE’s? With the shakeout is any CSE (aside from shopping.com) getting aggressive to keep customers? Is there any leverage for merchants?

March 19th, 2009 at 4:33 am |

Brian Smith said

Will – I think that you’ll see more of the shopping engines work with merchants to make things work, but I wouldn’t expect all the shopping engines to suddenly drop all cpc rates in half. To get better rates, I’d recommend being as open and honest with the shopping engines as possible. If things aren’t working, share your stats with them…help them understand your metrics…what cost of sale you have to hit in order for the marketing channel to be profitable.

March 19th, 2009 at 4:47 pm |

Richardson said

I have been solicited by Sortprice.com for about 2 years. They keep telling me to sign up because they have fixed pricing. Fixed pricing is great if the traffic was there. I doubt they can get me 600 clicks for the $200 a month they asked for.

May 6th, 2009 at 6:39 am |

Matt said

I actually think the flat rate price is genius. With click fraud, what real way do you have to truly see execution on a shopper. Advertising on the net is evolving along with so many other things. CPM makes more sense than CPC, but the Flat rate seems a perfect fit for the vendor looking to control costs and a win for the engine to keep the cost low to attract a keep as many vendors as possible. A fixed rate over CPC in this economy just makes more sense.

May 17th, 2009 at 6:49 am |

Tafuma Shopping said

You are right Richardson. Have you tried search engines who run a CPA model as opposed to CPC. I don’t know whcih ones to suggest for your market but in the UK we’ve got a handful of such Shopping engines.

May 29th, 2009 at 2:29 pm |

Art said

I used this blog as a list of the CSE’s to sign up for and for the most part they are working well, some extremely well! However, Sortprice is dismal. I’ve been up for 2 weeks and only gotten 20 visits…if I extrapolate that out (and using the $200 month fee) that works out to a CPC of about $5.00!! And I got one $55 sale. When I spoke to them I got the usual pap about how they usually see new companies volume go up over time. But even Adwords, where I get minimal sales, is at about .40 average CPC…I would need to get 500 visits from sortprice for that CPC. As a point of reference, the first month with Shopzilla we got 3,000+ visits and lots of revenue. These guys made me commit to 3 months minimum…is there any way out if this continues to be this bad?

June 15th, 2009 at 1:10 pm |

Jeremy said

To Art and whoever else has signed up with Sortprice.com.

I have been solicited the last 3 weeks by a rep from Sortprice.com. They are currently offering me the most expensive package for the lowest package price. So for $450.00 (since i have 1000 products and less), I will be bumped up to their super enhanced package. Sounds like a great deal, but I’m weary of the number of visitors they get. I’ve been checking out compete.com and quantcast.com to get a read on how much traffic they might be getting.

The rep claims they get over 5 million unique visitors a month. this isn’t even close to what compete and quantcast register.

With that being said, I want to hear from anyone who has registered with sortprice and give me your feedback. Yes/No?

If not, then what comparison shopping engine do you recommend using for the best ROI?

June 18th, 2009 at 4:44 am |

Live Ambitions said

I have been solicited by them as well. I’m a little skeptical about their ability to send any significant amount of traffic.

I mean I’ve tried all the major shopping engines such as Pricegrabber and Shopping.com, but even they couldn’t deliver much traffic. So, logically speaking, you can expect Sortprice to send even less traffic.

October 20th, 2009 at 11:39 pm |

Matt Nelson said

I have used Sortprice for the last 2 years and I’m up for renewal this month. I did get a huge break in pricing for my first campaign, but after my results turned out to be good, I have been paying full price for the last 18 months. Some products would not sell on any engine, but I can only speak for my self, and Sortprice.com has generated the highest ROI I have ever seen in 9 yrs. of business.

October 26th, 2009 at 3:20 pm |