Back in April of 2009 (has it been that long already?) Become.com began offering free logo listings on their site, provided that a merchant already bid $0.05 over the minimum bids (previously it was $0.10).

Their program has gained so much popularity recently that they’re extending this promotion on a permanent basis.

Thanks for letting us know what you think of our discounted logo program! We received such positive feedback from our retail partners on how the discounted logo performed for them during the holiday season and through January that we had to do it–we are keeping the discounted logo program.

The logo program will remain discounted, and bidding at least 5 cents above the minimum CPCs will allow you to a) take advantage of the positive impact that bidding makes on ranking and b) increase your branding on Become.com.

Happy bidding.

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CPC Strategy was founded by former employees of the comparison shopping engines and understands first hand what it takes to manage a successful comparison shopping campaign. Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.

Amazon’s Product Ads has gone from a platform that few have heard of into a major force into the comparison shopping industry. It’s not quite top tier yet but given the amount of traffic that Amazon gets it won’t be long until it approaches top tier level.

Recently then, they’ve announced some changes to improve the overall user experience:

More Real Estate:

o Now displaying 5 Product Ads instead of 3

o Amazon suggests the following 2 strategies to improve ad ranking:

§ Bid high

§ High-Quality images – increased page views by 60% & orders by 25% according to Amazon.com tests

Now Displaying Product Reviews:

o Implementing the same product reviews found on Amazon Marketplace (not merchant reviews, just product reviews).

o 84% of consumers more likely to check online for reviews prior to purchase according to survey by Brand Reputation.

New Help Content:

o Added new info about Invoicing but it doesn’t seem like there’s really anything new.

While their marketplace products (those listed directly on Amazon) will always dominate sales, Product Ads is coming up very strongly, and these new features should only further entice merchants to try to get listed on here.

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CPC Strategy was founded by former employees of the comparison shopping engines and understands first hand what it takes to manage a successful comparison shopping campaign. Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.

Today (Jan. 19th) is the last day for Yahoo Shopping merchants to sign up on PriceGrabber and be guaranteed placement on March 11th. If the date March 11th doesn’t mean anything to you, you’ve got some catching up to do.

Here is the link to the PriceGrabber merchant registration page - https://partner.pricegrabber.com/.

The minimum initial deposit is $50 and Yahoo merchants can use their xml export to meet PriceGrabber’s technical requirements.

You CAN still sign up for PriceGrabber after today, but they will not guarantee that your products will be live on both PriceGrabber and Yahoo Shopping on March 11th.

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CPC Strategy was founded by former employees of the comparison shopping engines and understands first hand what it takes to manage a successful comparison shopping campaign. Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.

We often get questions from merchants about the many services offered by Google to drive traffic and sales to their eCommerce websites. Due to the multitude of offerings and similar names making sense of Google’s major marketing channels can be a challenge to the casual observer. Below you’ll find CPC Strategy’s breakdown of Google’s product marketing tools as well as links to the Google page were you can find out more information about the service.

Google Adwords
Google Adwords is Google’s PPC program that allows merchants to create keyword and site-targeted advertising campaigns on both search result pages and websites participating in Google’s Adsense program. Advertisers are charged on a per click basis (usually), and are in control of where and how often their ad is displayed using Google’s bidding interface.

Google Adwords
http://adwords.google.com/

Google Product Search/Base
Google Product Search, formerly known as Google Shopping or Froogle allows merchants to post products online to a product database. Merchants submit data feeds to Google, which Google ranks, scores, and skus up against other sellers based on item relevance. These listings appear both in Google’s Shopping Portal and on search result pages (Onebox). At the time of writing Google Product Search is open to all advertisers and there is no cost associated with submitting data feeds and receiving traffic from this service.

Google Merchant Center
http://www.google.com/merchants

Google Product Extensions
Google Product Extensions is a new feature which marries Google Adwords campaigns with Google Product Search listings. Google Product Extensions supplement a merchant’s regular Adwords search-campaign with titles, images, and prices from a merchant’s Google Product Search inventory.  These inventory enhanced ads are displayed in the same right rail area of the search result page as text ads. Even though Google charges the same amount for clicks on Product Extension ads as they would for normal text ads we’ve seen an increase in click through rates for ads when the feature is enabled. This program is available to all US merchants who advertise on Adwords and send inventory files to Google Product Search.

More information about Google Product Extensions
Google Product Extensions Post

Google Product Listing Ads
Google Product Listing Ads are the newest addition to Google’s advertising suite and while they look similar to the ads surfaced through Google Product Extensions Google Product Listing Ads differ in two main ways. First, Google algorithmically chooses where, when, and how often these ads show up and second, the merchant does not pay for the click itself and instead pays only when a transaction is completed on the merchant page. Google Product Listing Ads are current in closed beta, but CPC Strategy will happily provide listing assistance once the product opens up to all advertisers.

More Information about Product Listing Ads
Google Product Listings Ads Post

Yahoo has now made it official:

We have important news that will affect your product listings on Yahoo! Shopping and that will require you to take action.

As of March 11, 2010, Yahoo! Shopping is partnering with PriceGrabber. This partnership will provide you with greater access to more potential customers and to enhanced reporting. It will give you the opportunity to list your products either on Yahoo! Shopping only or on both Yahoo! Shopping and PriceGrabber.

Because of this change, your Yahoo! Product Submit account will no longer be available on March 11, 2010. After March 11, 2010, to list your products either on Yahoo! Shopping only or on Yahoo! Shopping and PriceGrabber, you must sign up for a new merchant account with PriceGrabber. To ensure your products are live on Yahoo! Shopping on March 11, 2010, you must sign up for a PriceGrabber merchant account from January 11, 2010, through January 19, 2010. Signing up is fast and easy.

If you sign up before March 11, 2010, any applicable set up fees will be waived!

If you do nothing and do not sign up for a new merchant account, your products will only be listed on Yahoo! Shopping through March 11, 2010. After March 11, 2010, your products will no longer be listed.

PLEASE NOTE: If you already have a merchant account with PriceGrabber, you do not need to sign up for a new account. Your products will automatically be listed on both Pricegrabber and Yahoo! Shopping on March 11, 2010.

Your Key Dates to Remember:

January 11, 2010	January 19, 2010	March 11, 2010
Sign up for your new PriceGrabber merchant account with Yahoo! Shopping and PriceGrabber or with just Yahoo! Shopping.	Last day to sign up for a PriceGrabber merchant account to ensure your products are listed on Yahoo! Shopping and PriceGrabber when Yahoo! Product Submit is discontinued on March 11, 2010.	The Yahoo! Shopping and PriceGrabber partnership takes effect. If you have not signed up for a new PriceGrabber merchant account, this is the last day your products will be listed on Yahoo! Shopping.

In short, Yahoo Product Submit is shutting down, and listings on Yahoo Shopping will be generated via Pricegrabber data feeds.

This is big news for both companies and should help both in different ways.

What’s held Pricegrabber back from in the CSE space is that the amount of traffic that they get is slightly lower than Nextag’s/Shopzilla’s generally, and with access to Yahoo customers nowthat should help bolster their traffic (though it’s tough to tell if the traffic will be as qualified).

Yahoo will also benefit by allowing their merchants to use Pricegrabber’s tools, which are much more thorough than Yahoo’s, which in turn will let them more effectively manage their campaigns.

Also, as a company that’s been struggling over the past few years and have been cutting corners wherever they can, this should further help reduce their overall operating costs.

We’ll keep a close eye on this over the next few months and see how this move affects both companies.

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CPC Strategy was founded by former employees of the comparison shopping engines and understands first hand what it takes to manage a successful comparison shopping campaign. Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.

Users logging into their Nextag account this new year were greeted by a couple of new features on their screen:

The bidding history feature is a nice touch, but it’s the clicks by categories that merchants will find the most useful, as the performance of their products is broken down by specific categories:

For merchants with a highly diverse array of category listings this can be especially useful to figure out what products they should cut from their campaigns, or at the very least what to keep an eye on.

The other top-tier paid engines, i.e. Pricegrabber, Shopzilla, and Shopping.com already offer this on their sites, so merchants who are on the other engines should find this feature easy to use.

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CPC Strategy was founded by former employees of the comparison shopping engines and understands first hand what it takes to manage a successful comparison shopping campaign. Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.

Lesser known shopping engine Shop.com has just announced that they’re letting merchants list their coupon offerings on their site.

Customers on their site can go to their special coupons & offers and view what sort of deals are being offered, similar to Bing’s Cashback page:

An icon will also be posted alongside merchants participating in the program giving specific details of what a merchant is offering.

It’s a great move for an engine that doesn’t receive as much traffic as the top-tier ones, but enough for a merchant to consider listing on them, that will provide greater participation and interaction for both merchants and consumers alike.

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CPC Strategy was founded by former employees of the comparison shopping engines and understands first hand what it takes to manage a successful comparison shopping campaign. Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.

It was inevitable that comparison shopping would eventually reach mobile devices.

Amazon currently has an app out where consumers can shop for products on their iPhones, and it’s been reported that an eBay user purchased a Lamborghini as well as a boat on his iPhone as well.

Yahoo then has just announced that they’re introducing their own iPhone app for the Yahoo Shopping platform:

We are pleased to announce the launch of a Yahoo! Shopping iPhone app, which will be downloadable by iPhone users. Because mobile shopping is fairly new to most users, all clicks on your product listings delivered through the Yahoo! Shopping iPhone app will be free of charge until further notice.

We’re not sure how well this will work though, because unlike the marketplaces and eBay, the purchases will be made on the merchant’s webpage which may not be quite as well optimized for mobile browsing–while a customer will never have to leave eBay or Amazon when making a purchase.

Plus, consumers may be more leery making purchases via their mobile devices on a site they’ve never been to compared to more trusted names such as Amazon/eBay.

At least with the latter two, a user’s purchasing information is usually stored/linked to their login, while on a 3rd party site they would have to register for a new account or enter a credit card on their phone, which presents another barrier to purchase.

That may perhaps be why this traffic will be free, but as consumers begin to further adopt mobile technology it may eventually become just second nature.

Update: PriceGrabber follows Yahoo! Shopping’s lead by launching their own iPhone App today - http://www.pricegrabber.com/iphone_promo.php

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CPC Strategy was founded by former employees of the comparison shopping engines and understands first hand what it takes to manage a successful comparison shopping campaign. Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.

With Q4 shopping either right around the corner, or having already launched in full force depending on how you ask, now is just as important a time to take advantage of all the shopping engines have to offer right now.

Smarter.com is introducing a featured merchant program then, which at an additional rate of $0.20/click features:

- Premium placement on product page – a sure fire way to stand out amongst your competitors!
- Smarter.com Featured Merchant Logo
- Merchant Logo listed alongside all of your listings – excellent branding opportunity!
- Highlighted on category and search result landing page
- with the ability to opt-in at the account and category level

In essence then, merchants who participate in the program will be more prominently listed in search results, making consumers more likely to click through.

Normally for the larger engines inflating one’s traffic isn’t always the best idea since the costs will iust increase significantly, but as a smaller engine getting more traffic is generally a greater challenge.

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CPC Strategy was founded by former employees of the comparison shopping engines and understands first hand what it takes to manage a successful comparison shopping campaign. Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.

One of the unique aspects of CSE management is figuring out how all the shopping engines’ unique features differentiate themselves from each other.

While columns such as product URLs, product names, descriptions, etc. are generally universal among them all, there are many discrepancies among them that a merchant should know about in order to maximize their listings on the engines.

Below we provide details on practices that will help best promote your products specifically for each engine:

Listing Nextag Sales Price:

- Include MSRP or regular price in feed

Nextag Free Shipping:

- If everything has free shipping, select “Always Free for All Items” in the “Manage Shipping Rules” section
- Otherwise include shipping costs in feed

Nextag Promotional Message:

- For a single message, bid at least $0.05 on the “Message” under “Manage Bids by Category”, then click “Set Marketing Message” and choose from the available templates
- To select different marketing messages by product, include a “Marketing Message” column in the feed and be sure to bid at least $0.05 on the “Message” for all products under “Manage Bids by Category”

Listing Free Shipping:

- Set column “Shipping Rate” to 0 in feed

Shopping.com Promotional Message:

- Include message in “Stock Description” column in feed.
- Free
- 100 character limit

Shopzilla Free Shipping:

- If shipping is free for all products, select “Free shipping for all products” under shipping information.
- If not, set rules through feed, column: “Shipping Cost”

Shopzilla Sales Price:

- Include “Original Price” & “Sale Price” columns in feed
- Be sure to select Contact Us in your Shopzilla login and notify your account manager that you’re adding a column; your listings will temporarily come down while they re-process your feed.

Shopzilla Coupon:

- Go to “Manage Listings”
- “Special Offers”
- Select from the available options

PriceGrabber Free Shipping:


- Set it under the column “shipping costs” within the feed
- In the login under “Your Account” it can be modified in “Shipping and Tax Info” (not available for all accounts)

PriceGrabber Coupon:

- All the info can be included in the feed using their coupon spec sheet.

Google Products Search Tax and Shipping:

-Add a column called “tax” in the format–Country:State:Percent: y/n shipping

So for example if a merchant is based in the United States, California, charges 8% tax, and offers free shipping, that column would read– US:CA:8:y

More info can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=160162

Become Promotional Message:

- Include desired text in feed
- Bid on desired categories in “Bids” tab

Become Sales Price:

- Include the following columns: “MSRP” and “Price”

Smarter Promotional Message:

- Have the two columns: “Regular Price” and “Sale Price”
- Go to “Extras” tab
- Select “Submit Coupons” and fill in appropriate fields

Yahoo Shopping Sales Price:

- Have the two columns: “price” and “sale-price”

Yahoo Shopping Free Shipping:

- Fill in the appropriate SKU with “0” in the column “shipping-price”

Pronto Sales Price:

- Include the columns: “Retail Price” and “Price”

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CPC Strategy was founded by former employees of the comparison shopping engines and understands first hand what it takes to manage a successful comparison shopping campaign. Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.