Comments on: The Sears Marketplace Screw Up

By: Dee

Dee — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 02:41:17 +0000

Is this still happening, or has it been resolved? A client of mine is considering becoming a sears marketplace seller, but I want to make sure the operation is transparent before giving a goahead.

By: Justin

Justin — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 00:24:22 +0000

What Shopping Channel is feeding to the Sears Marketplace?

By: nfl sales nfl for sale jersey store

nfl sales nfl for sale jersey store — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 11:19:04 +0000

This would be like an advertiser developing two full page magazine ads… one for Sports Illustrated (targeted towards young males) and one for Martha Stewart Living (targeted towards middle aged women)… only to find out that Sports Illustrated, instead of publishing the ad that they were given, published an ad that Martha Stewart Living passed along to them… and they didn’t inform the advertiser…. and, well, you can guess what happened to the conversion rate…

By: Colin Murphy

Colin Murphy — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 17:41:28 +0000

The shopping engines syndicating their listings without advertiser visibility is a major issue. Through what other channel does an advertiser have no idea where or to whom their ads are displaying? In fact, visibility, track-ability and targeting are three of the main benefits of advertising online. When the shopping engines go the black box route and blindly syndicate advertisers’ listings, they are taking a huge step backwards.

This story is getting lots of play because big names are involved (Sears, Williams Sonoma, etc). However, regular SMB advertisers fall victim to these opaque syndication practices everyday. I even encounter merchants who have signed up with and are submitting their product feed to a particular shopping engine and – instead of publishing those direct listings – the shopping engine publishes syndicated listings that they are getting from another engine. You might ask why the engine would do this. The answer simply is: money. The “publisher engine” gets a percentage of the syndicated listings’ CPC fees (say 70%) and if that is greater than the direct CPC they are getting from the advertiser, they show the syndicated listing instead. Shameful.

By: Greg Goodson

Greg Goodson — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 17:16:24 +0000

You hit the nail on the head.

We had some big brands come to us and say “how the heck did we get on Shop.com? Take us down immediately”. Not only that, the delay to get these brands off of Sears.com took such a long time, I had to filter out these brands from our syndicated partner that we wound up losing some revenue from those engines until we were sure that all items were off Sears.

It may have been a good partnership between Sears and the CSEs they had joined forces with, but not nearly enough thought went into it. It’s amazing that engines like PriceGrabber and Shopping.com won’t give us a list of their syndicated partners… it’s probably because these engines know that once we see the list, we’ll immediately ask to be removed (*cough* click arbitrage *cough*).

– Greg