So I checked my email this morning and received my yearly notice that Pricegrabber and Nextag are upping their fees by 25%. I put up with this over the years, but this year is different. We are completely dropping the shopping engines and using that money to increase our paid advertising on Google/Yahoo/MSN.

25% is a pretty hefty chunk of change, especially considering that this is just the increase and doesn't include the principle amounts. I am extremely confident that using this money in-house will amount to better conversions and better retention of those customers.

The holidays are pretty tricky since most companies that sell direct to consumer rely on specific times of the year to capture customers and then retain them for the following year. Our business is not really affected seasonally, so this is more of a slap in the face to us.

I am wondering if anyone has completely washed their hands of the shopping engines either during or outside of the holiday season.

If so, what can we expect and where did you see the pickup from? Did one specific place capture the sales or was it an increase across the board? I know that using coremetrics and omniture we find that most of our sales have 3-5 trackable advertising venues as the source. Meaning that a purchase would hypothetically start at an affiliate -> then a google adword -> then a shopping site -> then another shopping site -> then another venue and ultimately become a purchase.

I am thinking that these really aren't links in a chain, so much as paths that can be rerouted. So removing a step from the process would not actually be breaking the chain, but merely diverting.

Any thoughts or insights on this would be much appreciated.

Thanks!