Being a new ecommerce store owner, i am seeking advise from anyone who has experience advertising on Price Comparison site.

Please advise your experience and especialy your ROI facts.

LinuxGUY

Danny has a good write up on your options at http://searchenginewatch.com/links/article.php/2156331

Hi linuxguy,

We were in the same quandry a few months ago and came up with the following list of worthwhile shopping engines:

-Yahoo! Shopping
-BizRate.com
-Shopping.com
-Kelkoo.com
-AOL Shopping
-MSN Shopping
-Nextag.com
-PriceGrabber
-AskJeeves.com
-PriceScan

Your choice of shopping engines will depend upon your target market's geographical area as well as type of products. For us, Froogle and Shopping.com have been especially good with nearly instant gratification. Conversely, BizRate and NextTag were a little slow in picking up. Hope this helps!

www.pricewatch.com is great for computers and electronic stuff.

also:

-froogle
-sortprice

Hi all,

I'm trying to get a handle on how much of you retailers' ppc spend is going to

Shopping.com
NexTag
BizRate/Shopzilla
PriceGrabber
MySimon

No need to break it out by the particular Comparison Shopping Engine (CSE), but if you care to comment on what % of ppc is going to the CSE's vs. Google and Overture, I'd appreciate it.

Thanks,

Shorebreak

(Per month expenditures)

Google - $40K
Overture - $30K
Shopping.com - $8K
BizRate.com - $8K
NextTag.com - $4K

My only experience has been managing a shopping.com account. In the first month our client saw a 10x ROI. They were spending $200 a month. The following month the ROI went down to about 1.5x

Currently there are no sales in July. So...started off strong then crapped out over time. Nothing has changed on his site and he has kept his inventory levels high and prices competitive. There doesn't seem to be an obvious reason for the quick decline in conversions.

Anyone else see this type of trend?

As a little update to my last post...I talked with my client a bit about this account yesterday. We have determined that unless he was the lowest or maybe second lowest price for his products, then he wouldn't get the sales. Comparison traffic are looking for one thing mainly...low prices.

When you advertise a product that has multiple competitors, especially those like big box retailers, household name electronics companies, etc., you're going to be hard pressed to compete and draw the sales from the lower priced offerings. Those huge companies work on a lower margin and also have better purchasing power. Small business will find it very hard to compete on a shopping comparison site unless they have a niche product, can somehow afford to price their products below cost or are the only ones that consistently have stock in the product.

WHen my client started his shopping.com campaign, he was one of three competitors for most of his ads. Now there are over ten ads for each product and he's usually one of the pricier ones. He can't lower his prices and it's hard to convince people that reliability and good service is worth the higher prices. So his sales have steadily declined because cheap competition has flooded his product lines.

Overall impressions: Don't do comparison engines unless you can afford to be one of the cheapest in your industry.

LeftoverJoe-

You make excellent points. However, Froogle is worth looking into-it's free. Also, if your customer has the highest price, what's the likely hood that someone will actually click on his ad? Not very likely, but there is still some branding effect. Finally, he can get a one up on the competitors by having a better rating and customer feedback.

LeftoverJoe-

You make excellent points. However, Froogle is worth looking into-it's free. Also, if your customer has the highest price, what's the likely hood that someone will actually click on his ad? Not very likely, but there is still some branding effect. Finally, he can get a one up on the competitors by having a better rating and customer feedback.

Good points Vinnie. I do think though that to get a good reputation among the listings with reviews, feedback and ratings, you need to generate a lot of sales. This is hard to do when you start out with a pricing disadvantage.

The Froogle idea is a good one. That's an excellent place to start. And branding does happen, regardless of your position in the listings...although branding is more effective when it's linked with rock bottom prices or those great reviews and ratings. It's all linked together and when there's a ton of competition it gets very difficult.

www.smarter.com is <Mod edit - note - this is the poster's own site as per profile> your good choice. :)