Any experienced e-commerce store owner will tell you the hardest part of this business is driving targeted traffic to your website – customers who are actually interested in your products and who are going to make a purchase. As with any website online, e-commerce or not, traffic is the driving force behind revenue. You must find ways to get targeted traffic to your website. This is done through SEO, PPC, magazine advertising, word of mouth, affiliate programs, and Shopping Comparison Websites. While all these methods might not be profitable for your niche or your products, the only way to find out what works and what doesn’t is trial and error.

One area I see which is under used by most e-commerce store owners are shopping comparison websites.

What are Shopping Comparison Websites?

Shopping Comparison Websites include sites like Shopping.com, Nextag.com, Shopzilla.com and Google Product Search. There are a wide variety of different shopping comparison websites out there. Most are PPC based. This means you bid for a certain spot in the search results similar to how Google works. A potential customer will go to a site like Shopzilla.com and search for a specific product. Most likey they are doing research for something they are looking to buy and are looking to find the best prices. These websites allow you to upload a feed of your products and bid for certain keywords. Say for example you have a website which sells wetsuits. When someone searches for any wetsuit related keywords your products will show up. When someone clicks on the product it takes them to your website and you get charged for the click.

One reason why shopping comparison websites are valuable to e-commerce store owners is because the traffic they bring to your website is very targeted since they are usually looking to buy.

One reason why a lot of store owners do not use these websites is because they require constant work. You have to set up a customized feed for each website and constantly monitor and tweak bids so you aren’t wasting money on non-converting products. Usually to start out with is not a good idea to use your entire product database. This will result is high costs and a wasted money.

A good strategy is to start with a few of your best selling (and most profitable) products. This will allow you to limit your budget and also find out at what bid amounts your campaign will be profitable. Once you have a profitable campaign with a few products, slowly start adding more and more products, constantly monitoring ROI to make sure you are not losing money. You must be constantly be testing and monitoring your bid amounts. Also it is essential that you are using some sort of analytics program (we recommend Google Analytics) to track conversions. You need to know which products, and which keywords are actually converting into sales. This will allow you to optimize your campaign and remove and keywords and products which are not performing well.

Which Shopping Comparison Website Should I Use?

With so many to choose from, the only real way to find out is trial and error. I would start with the bigger ones first and slowly test each one. Maybe your products don’t convert well with Shopping.com but do well with Nextag.com. The only way to find out is to test and track. Here is a list of the most popular Shopping Comparison Engines:

1) Shopping.com
2) Shopzilla.com
3) Yahoo Shopping
4) Nextag.com
5) MSN Shopping
6) Mezi Media sites
7) Froogle
8) Shop.com
9) AOL Shopping
10) PriceGrabber

Below is an excerpt from The Sitepoint Forums:

From a consumer perspective online comparison shopping sites are the best choice for their time and money. These sites allow shoppers to quickly see products with prices for multiple online retailers all on one screen. It's no wonder that they have increased in popularity in the last couple of years (Google Trends analysis). The 2008 holiday shopping season will no doubt bring more shoppers to those sites than ever before.

The major players in the comparison shopping space are Shopzilla, Yahoo Shopping, Shopping.com, NexTag, Google Base, and PriceGrabber.com. It's completely free to list products in Google Base (Froogle) which makes it an easy choice for enterprising retailers. Most other sites charge merchants on a pay per click basis. The minimum click charge varies depending upon the types of products a merchant is selling, but typically ranges from $.10 to 1.00. Merchants also can spend more to get higher ranking listings.

If a merchant has a professional looking store that yields a solid conversion rate, these pay per click channels can be lucrative. The key is measuring the success from each marketplace. If a merchant spends $500 on clicks at Shopping.com which results in $5000 in sales, the merchant need only have a 10% profit margin to break even. If the merchant's profit margins are closer to 20%, the merchant would see a 100% return on investment. Merchants that don't measure their return on investment (ROI) are bidding in the dark and essentially rolling the marketing dice. With online marketing and analytics, there is simply no need to market blindly.

Each comparison shopping site accepts data in a different format which can make getting data into the comparison engines difficult. However, there are ecommerce platforms available that will create data feed files for the merchants for each marketplace. There are also ways to automate the data feeds for Yahoo Shopping, Shopping.com, and Google Base to ensure product listings are up to date.

By searching for the comparison shopping brands on Google Trends (www.google.com/trends see link above) one will notice that there is consistently a spike in queries for the comparison sites during the holiday season. As the holidays approach, online merchants serious about capitalizing on holiday orders should surely consider the comparison shopping sites.

Here is another excerpt from The Sitepont Forums talking about how to optimize your feed.

 A lot of the times a low conversion rate in the channels (Comparison Shopping Engines) can be attributed to a data feed that is not optimized, or worse, is representing your business poorly. Let me explain:

There are usually four factors that go into a conversion when you come off the channels (CSE's).

1. Price, Price, Price = Bid, Bid, Bid...

Since its 90% about the price, then to get that click you better be either the lowest price (if people are comparing that), or be on the top of the list (bidding). If you're not in the top 5 on the bids, its likely you'll never get the click, but if you ARE getting the click through, and the conversion is not happening, see #2. If you are in the top position and not getting clicks, then you might be looking at a situation where your displayed terms (the information that the CSE shows the visitor about you) is just not right, or not favorable, see #3.

2. Shipping costs.

The first thing that you'll notice when you go to these CSE's is they try and setup shipping costs for you (to me they shouldn't bother). This is where 99% of the conversion failures happen. For example, Shopzilla now says that "anything with a $0.00 price on the product will be considered 'free shipping', where as most of the other engines see $0.00 and think 'no shipping charge for that product', which is different than free shipping.

I can almost bet that if your product price is the same or lower, but your shipping terms are not favorable, you WILL lose the sale. Check your shipping against the crowd. Make sure its clear, concise and make sense.

3. When the click happens, make sure you're presenting the product, your business and you professionally and favorably.

Remember, the point here. The customer is comparing you with a crowd of people who are selling the same thing.

If traffic is coming to the site in droves, and you're not converting. You better check your site against your competition. I bet you'll find that someone out there is getting the sale because they are offering the product cheaper, or with better overall terms, or just that they look better.

4. You can't improve what you don't measure.

If you can't measure whats happening and why things aren't working, and believe me, don't trust the comparison engines with reporting that information to you, its not something they put a lot of effort into because they make money on clicks, not conversions. Yes, if you're getting conversions, the customer is happy, but lets face it, they want the click money, if you're not converting, its not their fault. Measuring is tantamount to succeeding, and if you're not measuring, why bother.

These are two great posts, which can help you optimize you feed for the different Shopping Comparison Websites.

Don’t be afraid to try new marketing channels. This is the only way to see what works and what doesn’t for your store and your products. You might just find a diamond in the rough and find a channel which really skyrockets your sales and revenue.

About the Author: Brennan Heyde is an e-commerce consultant working in San Diego, Ca. He specializes in online marketing and SEO for e-commerce.  Have a struggling e-commerce website? – Contact Brennan today for a site analysis.