Online retailers still struggle to market their products through Comparison Shopping Engines. To make the best of these vertical search platforms, retailers should understand the significance of comprehensiveness and accuracy of the product catalog in the result page of the shopping engine.

It is a known fact that comparison shopping engines manage their own catalog of products and consider comprehensiveness and accuracy as the most essential factors for merchants as well as consumers.

Once you exhibit your products in a comparison shopping engine, they become
accessible to consumers when they search for specific products. The CSEs maintain the product catalog with their own specific SKU and it enhance the consumer’s experience to compare the listed products and prices through the product search feature. As a result, CSEs promote their product pages more prominently than the merchant's product listings. It is essential for an online retailer to map their product listings according to the Comparison Shopping Engine’s taxonomy.

There are 2 things to be considered about Comparison Shopping Engines catalog:

Correct Mapping:The product data should match with the given Comparison Shopping Engine’s product catalog. Use the exact UPC, SKU, and Part Number for every unique product which meets the industry standards. International variations, derivatives, or using your own catalog product identification number will actually disturb the alignment of product catalog with the CSE. Work closely with your data feed management company (if you outsource) to map the feeds as per CSE’s format. Optimize your product identification as ultimately it is going to be a common link between your product feed & CSE’s catalog.


CSE’s catalog are imperfect: Hard to believe, but its true: CSEs manage their catalog by conferring with the vendors/manufacturers & with their hired editorial staffs. The process adopted by CSEs actually leads to greater percentage of errors in constructing product database as different vendors give different product identification. In such case even if you have optimized your data feed by inserting all promotional keywords, titles & descriptions and street names, the product catalog will not be displayed in the CSEs.

A CSE cannot promote or list the product if a particular SKU provided by an online retailer is not available in its catalog/product database. This SKU will not receive traffic from the CSE and the online retailer might wonder why his competitive pricing, aggressive offer, and optimized feeds have not delivered the expected results.

These considerations and challenges are not limited to consumer electronics industry but also to apparels, books, music, DVD, and video games.

Here is the small check list for online retailers before going for a listing on CSEs.

Screen their catalogs for your top selling products and look for Product Pages on the CSE.

Understand how CSE catalogs are managed and their up to date maintenance and work on mapping product data feeds accordingly.