Tips to control costs on the Comparison Shopping sites

Get the most out of the free channels

Try and use the free price comparison channels like Google base and TheFind.com to their fullest potential.

Uses two/three Tier-2 channels to balance your cost.

List your products on a few tier-2 channels like Pronto, SortPrice, Become, Smarter etc.

Monitor costs regularly

Monitor your cost on each channel regularly and try to raise your bids accordingly

Do not list all the products on all the channels. Need to have strategy

Listing all the products across all the Price comparison engines is a killer. Each channel has a different set of competitors and different combination of products to compete. So carefully analyze the channels and list your products in a competitive manner.

Biding strategy in relation to your Competitors and their strategies

Many sellers on these Comparison channels don’t even using bidding as an option. Bidding is a very productive option if used with a proper game plan. Identify all those products that you have a competitive edge and which you think will convert better if we could increase the visibility. We can just slowly bid them higher. Most of the channels these days allow product level bidding..

Know your competitors

Always understand your Competitor at the channel level and have a channel specific listing and bidding strategy depending on your competitors on that channel

Product level strategy

We almost talked about this across this posting. But to summarize always identify the list of products that convert better or on which you have a competitive edge for you and give them the visibility by raising the bids so they can rank higher.

Always try to look at the broader picture (over all clicks across the channels)

To prune out the non converting products we should always look at the over all data( we should look at the performance of that product across all the channels) that is when you can identify the most cost drainers quickly and prune them out or get back to the drawing board to see what is wrong with that product and why its not converting

Listing strategies for better results on the Comparison Shopping sites

Keyword rich title and description
We should use the maximum Character limitation provided by the Comparison-shopping channel to give as much information as we can. Make sure to blend in the keywords for which you want your products to show up.
Remember.
The entire Title and Description is searchable on most of the Comparison channels

Optimize your listing
Use the options given by the channel to differentiate your product listing from the rest of products by adding things that will attract the attention of the buyer.

Submit feeds regularly. Twice a week is the best thing to do.
Most of us typically send the feeds one in a fortnight or whenever there are major changes to the feed. But most of Comparison-shopping sites, these days give a better ranking to the feeds that are submitted frequently. So it is very important that we send an updated feed to all the channels atleast twice a week.

Uploading the feed every day has doubled the orders that I got from Google base

Provide as much information as you can
Build your feed with the maximum information you can give the Channel, the more the information and the more the attributes you submit, your products are that much more searchable.

Submit channel specific feed
Though there are a lot Comparison-shopping channels that accept other channels feed. If you have the time and patience, its always advisable to build a channel specific feed as per the instruction of that specific channel and upload it. The feed indexing bots on the channel do a better job when the feed is built as per their site specifications.

Don’t quote your price way too low even though you are able to source the product at a very low cost.
Though we all know that these channels are price sensitive we should avoid listing our products at a very low price then the second lowest competitor.

Typically if there are 10 people selling the same product and most of them are pricing the product around $10 do not ever make a mistake of pricing the same product at $5 or so though you might have struck a deal and procured it at that low cost from the vendor.
This for sure will kill the confidence of the buyer and for sure cause some suspicion on the quality of the product and the authenticity of the price

Understanding a typical buyer on Comparison Shopping site

These are the basic qualities of a typical shopper on the comparison shopping site

Price Sensitive

The average customer on the Comparison Shopping site is a price sensitive customer; typically looking for the best price he can get the product for

Ratings are a confidence booster

Once the product is finalized, one would obviously look for the Store ratings to see if the product he is buying will be delivered as promised.

Store ratings are as important as the Price. So always “Under promise and over deliver”

They are out there to compare the price

Most of the times, we notice they often come to a Comparison Shopping site to have an understanding of the product and know the approximate price of the product, which they want to buy. So appearing very high on the listings also will not help much as we end up taking a lot of clicks from people who just want to compare the costs and go and buy it offline.

Ships faster

After the price and store ratings, the “shipping lead time” makes a lot of difference. So whoever promises to ship the product faster gets the sale.

“Price attracts the potential customer to your listing and good ratings and faster shipping coverts them in to a buyer”