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Showing posts with label comparison shopping engines. Show all posts
Showing posts with label comparison shopping engines. Show all posts

Price Grabber for sale - ANYBODY INTERESTED???

It has been less than three years since Experian, the credit-checking giant has bought the price comparison website Price Grabber for an approximate amount of $500 million. Recently, Experian has been hit by a credit squeeze at banks and experiences downturn in fortune, so it has decided to put Price Grabber on the block.
According to Sunday Times, Experian has appointed Allen & Co, an American boutique advisory house to find buyers for Price Grabber. City sources said that simultaneous sale of Yahoo’s Kelkoo, a European shopping comparison site might affect the price tag of Price Grabber.
Price Grabber
, a Los Angles-based site was initiated by Kamran Pouzanjani in the year 1999 with $1.5m and has an average of 26m online visitors every month. Though Price Grabber’s revenue rose by 9% last October, the overall revenue of Experian’s core credit checking business witnessed a 2% decline. In order to overcome the impairment Price Grabber is put on sale. Sunday Times reported that Experian was not open to comment on the sale.
Source

2 Hidden Truths About Comparison Shopping Engine

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.

25 most famous Comparison Shopping engine and their business model



Here is the list(above) of most popular comparison shopping engines exists in the product internet marketing industry. I have also provided their asscociated revenue model(s).

Above information is incomplete unlesss i provide you the top 10 shopping engines according to comscore media metrix on basis of no. of unique visitors in Jan' 2007.

1. Shopping
2. Shopzilla
3. Yahoo! Shopping
4. Nextag
5. MSN Shopping
6. Mezi media site (smarter,coupon mountain)
7. Google base (Product search)
8. Shop.com
9. AOL Shopping
10. Price Grabber

Can a Shopping Comparison Engine Give Quick Sale?

An online retailer seeks different online channels to promote products over internet, and Shopping Engines have become one of the preferred channels. To list in CSEs, retailers have to prepare and submit data feeds in the format which CSE demands. After submitting the feeds many retailers expect immediate conversion to happen with out even understanding the actual purpose of the shopping engine.

It is necessary for an online retailer to understand that the shopping engines are a platform for online shoppers to compare the products in terms of price, positive reviews, ratings, etc before making a purchase.

Note: Traffic is just an opportunity generated through shopping engine. The real challenge of converting it into sales relies on effective shopping engine campaign and user-friendly landing page.

Shopzilla announced BizRate Research Circle of Excellence Awards for 2007

Online retailers are preferred to a great extent by the consumers as they tend to meet the customer’s expectation, even though more than 60% of online shoppers believe that cheating via online is increasing as the merchants are dealing with low quality products & lack of proper responses / customer support offered by them.

Shopzilla has recently announced the winners of 8th Annual BizRate research circle of Excellence Platinum Awards, 2007”. The awardees are the best online retailers, who serve their consumers with high level customer satisfaction. It is monitored and finalized by the consumers of these online merchants. This year 73 retailers have been honored with this prestigious award for their performance in the internet retailing business.

According to Ms. Helen Malani, Chief Operating Officer of Shopzilla, “Nowadays Online shoppers have shown a smart change in authenticating these online merchants by discussing with their peers & relatives. More than 67% of online shoppers consider customer rating provided to these online merchants as a precautionary measure while selecting them for purchase”.

The winners of the BizRate Research Circle of Excellence Platinum Awards are the online merchants with whom the consumers can feel confident shopping with, as these merchants consistently offered superior customer satisfaction through out the year. Excellence Platinum awards are based on above average performance of the online merchants on seven key satisfaction metrics:

Industry Average (on a 10-point scale):

1. Overall Satisfaction 8.71

2. Product Selection 8.62

3. Ease of Finding Products 8.68

4. Repurchase Intent 8.79

5. Product Met Expectations 8.83

6. On-time Delivery 8.85

7. Customer Support 8.53

The list below consists of few Awardees based on category:

  1. Electronics – Cruthfield, Buydig, GPS store.
  2. Computers & Softwares – 4Inkjets, LD Products, B & H Photo video.
  3. Clothing’s & Accessories - Zappos, ELuxury, Shoes, eBags, Sheplers.
  4. Home & Garden – Personalization mall Inc., Oneida, Lenox Group Inc.

17 simple tips to optimize shopping engine campaign

  • Add MPN or UPC product code.
  • Add products to the appropriate category (comply with CSE taxonomy)
  • Always include searchable keywords in product description.
  • Make use of custom/optional fields for better visibility on CSEs(utilize it for additional product attributes)
  • Add relevant keywords to the product title and description.
  • Make sure that you have provided active & correct link of product landing page.
  • Monitor competitors prices frequently & strategically decide the sale price. Conduct Price Analytics
  • Provide attractive offers like Free Shipping, Discount sale, Clearance sale, coupan & rebates etc...
  • Understand Data feed requirements of each CSE while creating, optimizing & submitting the product data feed to them.
  • Drop down non-Performing products
  • Remove out of stock products
  • Conduct FDSI (Features, Description, Specifications, Images) comparison analysis with yours and other merchants in the shopping engine
  • Give correct product image
  • Conduct A/B testing and track which ad works best for you. Click here for A/B testing basics
  • Figure out ROI from each comparison engine and turn off if any specific engine is not performing well.
  • Review and submit shopping feed frequently.
  • If there is high a CTR (Click through rate) from CSE with no returns/sales there might the following possible problems related to your feeds and/or landing page.

Wrong Placement of Product in the shopping engine will also yield tons of irrelevant clicks...
  • A Shopper might come to the retailer site with an intention to learn about the product.
  • A slight difference in the title and description will discourage users to buy products.
  • Links do not take users to the correct landing page.
  • Unreliable Merchant - (Look and Feel is not good, Not a secure website, Bad information structuring, invisible or wrong placement of shopping cart, etc)
  • Product specification mismatch
  • Price mismatch
  • Shipping information mismatch
  • Long checkout process

Value Click purchases Mezimedia (Smarter)

Value Click, an Online Marketing firm agrees to acquire Mezimedia, operator of the comparison shopping engine websites (Smarter.com and Couponmountain.com). Mezimedia was founded in the year 2001 and currently it has about 160 employees with approximate revenue of $40M in 2006.

The deal is for about $100M, plus earn out. Further, value click added the deal could be around $352M, depending on the performance of Mezimedia. Previously, Valueclick has also acquired Pricerunner in the year 2004, and now Mezimedia will be added on the acquisition list of Valueclick.

Tips to Optimize Google Base Data Feeds

Google Base is a platform where you can submit all types of online and offline content. To be more precise, Google Base is an online database & free web publishing service provided by Google.

Contents which are submitted to Google Base will be automatically included in other Google database. The content will also be searchable and viewable on other Google properties like Google search engine, Google product search, Google maps, etc depending on the contents/items relevancy.

In order to get the most out of Google Base, submitters must optimize the feed which is submitted to it. Optimizing will actually benefit publishers to rank better in the search engine result page.

What all can you publish on Google Base?

Google Base has two options. Choose from existing item types which contain Course schedules, Events and Activities, Personals, Products, Jobs, wanted ads etc; or, you can create your own item type.

Contents/items you submit must contain attributes and labels that help users to locate the product they are looking for.

Attributes are nothing but phrases that describe the characteristics of a product.

Labels are keywords such as Jobs, Products, and so on. These keywords categorize your items.

Currently, Google has some predefined product specifications/attributes like Author, Size, Format, Color, Height, Weight etc.

Google Base feed has an option wherein you can use your own unlimited custom attributes. Custom attributes will allow you to set or specify additional product information.

How to Optimize Google:

Maximum utilization of custom attributes will optimize Google Data Feeds, which would eventually reflect on Google main search engine, froogle (Google product search) etc.

Optimum usage of custom attributes provides ample information to Google base about your data. More product information you give, higher are the chances of your page appearing on the search engine result page.

Utilizing the custom attributes will give you more traffic and success.

One important thing to note! When a user starts searching by putting a product-oriented query in the search box such as Canon Power shot A530, the possibility of a sale is higher.

Say for example, if you want to submit information on digital camera…

Some general attribute Google base might have is Color, Weight, Size, etc

The following are some of the custom attribute relating to the digital camera

Display
Display Size
Battery Type
Interface Type
Memory Type
Max shutter speed
Min shutter speed
Image Sensor Type
Min Aperture
Max Aperture
Camera Type
Lens Type
Image Format
Min Focal Length
Max Focal Length
Digital Zoom

The more product information you give, the more quality traffic you will get...



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Providence Equity Partners bought 66% stake worth of $830 Million in Nextag

Wall street Journal: Last 2 years has recorded behemoth merger & acquisition in the Ecommerce industry particularly in CSEs market. CSEs market is experiencing a phenomenal growth from the last 2 years. As a result, lots of media & internet companies showing their interest in form of acquisitions in the CSEs market.
In the recent buyout, VC firm Providence Equity Partners had recently bought 66% stake in Nextag. Nextag business was reportedly valued at $1.2 billion out of which 66% buyout cost $830 million to Providence.

Providence Equity is an US venture capital firm which started business in 1990. Over its history, the firm has invested in more than 100 companies in the media and entertainment industries. Assets under management are about $9 billion. Providence Equity has typically made purchases of traditional media companies. Its move into the Internet business could either signal it no longer perceives that traditional media companies are worth taking private, that consumer Internet companies have greater appreciation potential or that the hidden details of this particular deal were just too good to pass up.

Nextag is an San Mateo, CA based privately held internet comparison shopping company operates other site in UK allows 11 million online shopper a month to find the best deal on products & services sold by web/online merchants.

Recent buyout:
Consumer Search sold to About.com
Nextag 66% stake sold to Providence Equity Partners
Price Runner sold to Value Click.

Pricegrabber.com launches "Shop Green"

Price grabber has launched a new shopping concept called "Shop green". In Shop Green online shopper will be able to find all eco-friendly products for Home, for Office, for Him, for Her, for Kids, for Fun etc.

Price grabber has also decided to donate 5% of all revenue from sales through Shop Green to the charities that promote environmental conservation. They have selected few numbers of organization whom they feel are worthy of their support.

"Green Charities" This Month:
Lloyd Center
Earth Day Network
Trust for Public Land
Environmental & Energy Study Institute
clean Water Fund
The Nature conservancy
Sustainable conversation

The Big Rumor - Yahoo to Buy Bebo for $1B

There was a big rumor floated in UK this Sunday that, yahoo is working on to buy bebo, a UK based social media networking site for $1billion. Currently, bebo has around 25m users worldwide, compared to MSN’s 100m registered users.

It is a known fact that yahoo tried to buy facebook.com last year. Having failed to take over, there is no option left to yahoo to turn to bebo. I wonder why yahoo should acquire bebo. Is it just because they don’t have major stake in the social networking?

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