Posts Tagged ‘Shopping.com’

Selling a Product With Variations? Crowd Shopping.com Listings!

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

I’ve been posting quite a bit on Shopping.com lately, why stop now? Shopping.com is unique among the major comparison shopping engines in that it can and will show multiple listings from one company on a product page.

For example, searching for “windows XP” and clicking on the first result provides the following as part of the product page:

Shopping.com Product Crowding

You can see that VioSoftware.com and RoyalDiscount.com have two listings displayed. That is because there is the OEM version as well as the Retail version of the software. For my company, we have products that can have up to five variations displayed from one company on a product page.

A savvy merchant with variations on a product might want to submit as many variations as possible to crowd the Shopping.com listing page. Hey, real estate is real estate, and listing more products is free.

Of course, as a consumer, I would like Shopping.com to clean it up to allow for more apples to apples comparisons. A product that offers significantly more functionality should not be compared to a base model of the same product. But I am a merchant concerned with optimization – and this is one way to get ahead.

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Posted in Comparison Sites | 4 Comments »

Shopping.com Turning the Page? And NexTag Drops Feature.

Monday, March 3rd, 2008

Recently I wrote two posts about Shopping.com’s miserable response to merchants. It appears that they are starting to turn things around at the eBay-owned comparison engine.

First, with my company I have noticed a dramatic decrease in our average cost per click. First it showed up in the month of January, then even more so in the month of February. While we are still getting junk traffic, at least we are not being charged for it. It seems that Shopping.com is being proactive and listening to merchants that were complaining about the traffic from partner sites. The next step is giving merchants the option to opt out of the partner network, much like Google does with Adwords.

Secondly I received a newsletter from the Shopping.com CEO Joshua Silverman which explained in part that “As our traffic increased in the past quarter, it placed some unexpected strains on our systems.”

So the olive branch has been extended from Shopping.com as it pertains to the acknowledgment that some things were wrong with the company. As I said before, growing pains can do that. The main benefit of the newsletter is that merchants are finally getting some sort of communication from the comparison engine.

In other news, NexTag appears to not be displaying the purchases column I mentioned earlier. I could not find much supporting information on it, which is a bit perplexing. But be on the lookout for it in the future – and know that John E Middleton found it first! :-)

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Posted in Comparison Sites | 1 Comment »

Valentine’s Day comparison engine logos

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

Valentines Day is here and the comparison shopping engines have been spreading the love through customized logos. Take a look!

Shopping.com Valentine's Day logo

 

ShopZilla Valentine's Day logo

 

Smarter.com Valentine's Day logo

 

Become.com Valentine's Day logo

 

TheFind.com Valentine's Day logo

Personally my favorite is Shopzilla.

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Posted in Comparison Sites | No Comments »

Shopping.com Ignoring 95% of Merchants

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how Shopping.com was slow in responding to merchant inquiries. Through my research in turns out they aren’t just slow, they are ignoring merchants altogether.

My company uses a feed management service (where a merchant uploads a single feed and the company sends it out to the comparison sites formatted correctly, usually packaged with some sort of analytics package). The company has told me not to expect a response from Shopping.com, as they have the worst response rates of all the comparison shopping engines. My experience has validated this claim.

Another one of my sources has told me that it appears that only the top 300 merchants on Shopping.com are getting access to speak with Shopping.com employees. According to Richard at ReadWriteWeb, as of August 2007 there were over 6000 merchants listing on Shopping.com. Think to yourself: how would your business do if it ignored over 95% of its customers? I would venture to think not too well.

I am continuing to gather more information as I try to solve this issue. Earlier I thought it was because of the rapid growth of Shopping.com coupled with new features they are trying to roll out, but I question the wisdom of this lack of communication.

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Posted in Comparison Sites | 2 Comments »

Shopping.com Merchant Response Woes

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

Shopping.com made waves by choosing to not accept new applications from merchants from October 24th to December 31st of 2007. This was presumably because Shopping.com grew too fast for their staff to keep up with the new applications. Shopping.com (which owns DealTime.com) has seen a spike in traffic quite more than ShopZilla.com (which owns BizRate.com) and PriceGrabber (which also feeds to quite a few other sites).


Now it appears that the damage is being spilled over to the current merchants as well. Contact requests are not being responded to for weeks, and their phone number responds to merchants by telling them to first hold, then they’re given the option to leave a message or hold, and finally leave a message or hang up; all within the span of a minute. Shopping.com has no intention of answering the phone.

This reminds me of the concept of sustainable growth. Shopping.com grew, but could not keep up with that growth and faces the withdrawal of its merchants. This does not bode well for them, especially given the case of click fraud where, given no response from Shopping.com, the frustrated merchant’s only option is to pull the plug.

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Posted in Comparison Sites | No Comments »