I’m shocked. Not only did PriceGrabber roll out a new bidding tool, but the tool allows merchants to bid under rate card rates. You can bid under the category minimum. In other words, there effectively isn’t a minimum.
Merchants tied to category minimums on shopping engines usually have to suppress some/many SKUs from engines in order to meet a goal metric, even after optimizing titles, descriptions, etc. [SingleFeed highly recommends qualitative data feed optimization before thinking about bidding or SKU suppression.] Instead of sending 1000 products to a shopping engine, a merchant might eventually cut a data feed in half in order to meet a certain COS. Which means that the shopping engine gets less product variety and consumers using the shopping engine have a poor on site experience.
Google Merchant Center doesn’t have the problem of merchants suppressing SKUs en masse because it’s a free shopping engine. Bing Cashback also doesn’t have this problem as merchants can set cashback amounts by SKU. But most PPC shopping engines definitely see merchants cut active SKU count or shut down a shopping engine campaign altogether.
PriceGrabber’s bidding tool doesn’t seem to be available to all merchants. And it’s not clear whether products bid under the rate card category minimum will actually show up in search results, but I’d assume the products would at least show up below the regular cat minimum paid listings. Why not? The more pages of listings, the more opportunity for PriceGrabber to monetize, whether through the merchant listings, graphical ads, or sponsored links (from Google).
There must be a listing/ ranking penalty for the low bid.
Will this be different than zero bids in Shopzilla?
In that case your products will only show when there is no alternative.
They haven’t released many details yet, but yes, I’d assume it’s very similar to zero bidding on Shopzilla. Will let you know more when I can. Thanks for reading, Steven.
What does Shopzilla do?
Do they list the deals with a zero bid at the end of the result page?
Is this valid for the us only?