A new breed of web search engines with cool names like Froogle™, Nextag®,
Pricegrabber®, and Shopzilla™, have become increasingly popular with online
buyers in recent months. Unlike their better-known, search-the-entire-web colleagues,
these specialized “comparison shopping” engines focus on listings from online stores,
and they include key product details—such as price—right in the search results.
Product information is often placed side by side in a grid-like format, which helps
shoppers easily compare features and pricing from multiple vendors.
As an online store owner, if you’re not already leveraging listings in
one or more of these comparison shopping engines to help drive new (and interested!)
buyers to your site, consider this statistic: one in three Internet users now visits a
comparison shopping site in a typical month.
A boon for merchants
The benefits of getting your products listed in these engines are two fold.
First, they provide increased visibility and brand recognition for your online store.
After all, having your items featured side by side with major web properties looks
impressive! The second and perhaps greater benefit is that they tend to bring highly
focused customers to your site who are looking for something specific and are often ready
to purchase that item. According to one Forrester Research study, around 18 percent of
America Online’s shoppers are using comparison search engines, but the comparison
shoppers spent a 24 percent more than those using traditional search methods.
Popular Comparison shopping engines
For online store owners wanting to get listed in comparison shopping engines,
the number of engines and choices can be overwhelming. While a few shopping
engines allow merchants to list their sites for free, each engine uses its own
algorithm for ranking and displaying search results, and most charge merchants
fees for prominent listings.
To help you decide which engines may be right for your business, a comparison
of several major engines is provided below. Remember that fee structures and
policies are updated regularly—so you’ll need to stay on top of these to maximize
your return on investment.
Search Engine
Pricing Policy
Product Update Method
More Information
Free
Merchants register through a Google e-mail
(Gmail) account and upload products through a comma
separated value (CSV) product data feed file.
There’s no doubt about it, comparison shopping search engines are here to
stay. Be sure to watch future issues of this e-newsletter for analysis of
additional engines, more tips, and advice about how to leverage the benefits this
new medium can bring for online store owners.
