Are you having success with Comparison Shopping Engines?

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I have to admit to not being overly impressed with most comparison shopping engines (CSEs) – their growth in recent years has been flat compared to the rest of ecommerce. However it appears that CSEs can still return some bang for your money.

Drs. Foster and Smith, the largest pet supply catalog retailer in the US have grown their CSE generated business by 107% in the last year. They use ChannelAdvisor to manage their CSE feeds as this allows for retargeting campaigns and tracking of interactions and click-throughs. The reporting enables Drs. Foster and Smith to determine which products and comparison shopping engines are performing the best, which helps guide future marketing decisions.

If you have an ecommerce website you should be sending a feed to Google as a minimum (especially as it’s free!), but the success of Drs. Foster and Smith suggests that sending a feed alone isn’t enough – optimising their feed has enabled them to generate a 19% conversion ratio which is pretty impressive.

Are you using CSEs and if so which do you have the best success with? If you’ve never used CSEs don’t forget we have an Introduction to Comparison Shopping Engines to help you get started.

5 Responses

  1. I’m not having much luck with shopping comparison websites. My website has only been running from the start of the year so I can’t comment on prior years. Most of the trouble is the economical climate we are in. The high street retailers are going bust and no ones spending their money at the moment.

  2. Not something we pay for, there are a couple of sites that make no charge such as shopwiki.

    I don’t really like them if I am buying something, most are to fussy.

  3. We had some reasonable orders over Christmas using a couple of comparison sites, seems the best time to use but often the prices do go up.

    We use a company that take the feed from us and can then plumb it into anything we need like comparison sites, google shopping etc

    Stu

  4. Comparison sites generally revolve around price which is okay if you are happy to slash prices to stay competitive for less.

    The computer industry killed itself by becoming too price competitive, resulting in smaller margins, reduced consumer choice (because of chasing rebates) and worst of all staff wages became stagnant which ultimately became demoralizing.

    There are far more options out there to be investing in. (But I’m not sharing that!!!)

  5. Apart from Google Shopping, Shopwiki and The Find, does anyone know of any free shopping comparison websites to send a data feed to?

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