A while back we told you about the Google Base Doomsday bug in which one of the sections on Google Base’s dashboard is incapable of showing 5 figures.

It’s mainly irrelevant and doesn’t really affect merchants with a relatively large number of products (> 10,000), but for merchants with a super feed, e.g. in the million product range, an extra step is required in order to make sure all their products are listed.

Per Google’s instructions:

Note: You can post as many items as you like. However, if you plan on sending us more than 100,000 items, please contact us so we can make the appropriate changes to your account.

If you happen to be in that boat then, send over a request to our good friends at Google at their help center.

One client of ours has nearly a million unique SKUs listed on Google Base consisting mainly of items you can find around your house–potentially enough to furnish a small country with.

We’re not exactly sure if there is actually a maximum number of products that Google will allow in a single data feed, but given their massive server farms, a million here and there probably won’t have much of an effect on their hardware.

Our colleague within CPC Strategy made this interesting discovery while browsing for summer dresses over at Shopzilla–who apparently have recently added a label title “free shipping” embedded between the merchant name and their price for merchants who qualify to do so.

Click the image below to see an example:

What does this mean for merchants?

It essentially gives merchants a great option to make sure that their products aren’t overlooked when it comes to the saturated search terms, such as, summer dresses.

Perhaps you want to promote a special line of products of yours that aren’t converting very well and doesn’t cost too much to ship–why not consider offering it for free? Shipping costs are essentially seen as a tax to a customer that he/she has to pay for the convenience of shopping online, and many consumers are as drawn to the phrase “free shipping” as they would be to say “tax free” at a brick & mortar store.

Merchants that are worried about a loss in their bottom line by offering free shipping may even see an increase in overall sales by raising their prices proportionally to what it would cost to ship an item, as the barrier of shipping costs once overcome may be enough to convince a potential customer to shop with you.

After all, when making a purchasing decision online there are few things that will draw more eyeballs than the word “free”–even if it ends up costing something.

It’s commercialism at its best.

/the previous post was brought to you free of charge, hope you enjoyed it

Hope the holiday weekend treated everyone well, and while many of you were out celebrating some time away from work, another “company” has popped upon revisiting the coverage we brought you of people piggybacking off other sites.

This time the company is called a SalesGoodBuy a SalesDeal who is not only ripping off the great Zappos brand, but many others as well.

Edit: They were up yesterday under the psdeudonym a SalesGoodBuy, today they’re “a SalesDeal”

Edit #2: They’re gone again.

In total they’re listing over 240,000 270,000 products at last count, and essentially morph into many other sites, including online shoe retailers Designer Shoes, 6pm, and other sites such as the House of Nutrition, and Jewelry Impressions.

Thanks to Tom Wilson’s great Google Base tool, we’re able to see that all these products just popped up today (click on more details under one of the listings).

As we stated in our previous post, the fact that Google Product Search allows both free listings and clicks can be both its best asset merchants, as well as its worst enemy when it comes to these types fraudulent listings.

These types of clicks ultimately and unfortunately cost the retailers a lot of money, since they have to pay their affiliates a percentage of the sales made, which end up going straight to the fraudsters.

We’ll forward these over to our good friends at Google and keep you updated on what steps are taken.

And with that we’ll see you on the engines, hopefully through direct, nonfraudulent clicks

We mentioned in our previous post how merchants posting on Amazon’s marketplace can greatly benefit by essentially piggybacking off the Amazon brand by passing it off as their own which increases the likelihood that a customer will buy their products.

But what happens when someone tries to completely piggyback off of your site, without your approval or knowledge, and benefit from your brand and sales?

The following is a case study of how a site can pass themselves as another one–and through the darker, more underground realms of the internet can profit off your blood and tears* in creating your business.

Since CPC Strategy’s inception as an early start-up, one of the companies that we’ve most admired along the way and are huge fans of is online shoe retailer Zappos.

Their reputation in the way they run their company and treat their employees is well documented around the web. Throw in 24-hour customer service, and a 365-day, free return policy and you can see that they’re not only a great place to work for, but a place that provides a tremendous buyer’s focused experience as well. It should come as little surprise that their feedback rating is an incredible 4.9/5 based on 1,633 customer reviews.

It was only a matter of time then before someone else would try to benefit off this incredible brand.

Our investigative team* has discovered a non-existent brand that pawns off their success. In essence, it appears that they have submitted a data feed to Google Base that mirrors each and every product that Zappos has, while providing their own URLs which redirects directly to Zappos.

Here are a few examples (click on the picture to go to the URL):

You can see that if you click on the “Nifty Nitty” links–which isn’t a real site, and whose home page is blank–go directly to Zappos’ product pages. We’re not just talking about a handful of products either, “Nifty Nitty” has a link for each and every single Zappos product, all 98,698. To add insult to injury, a lot of their products rank higher than Zappos’ as well, due to some Google Base optimization techniques–so a consumer will be much more likely to get through Zappos via Nifty Nitty than directly through Zappos.

What is the purpose of this?

From what we understand, Nifty Nitty-whose domain information is locked and unavailable to the public-is part of an affiliate network that is making commission off each sale that is made, all at the benefit of Zappos. Plus, since it is Google Base, every click is free, it’s a complete arbitrage opportunity.

*journalistic hyperbole

While our backgrounds at CPC Strategy revolve around the comparison shopping engines, we’ve found that the marketplaces are an extremely beneficial spot to sell your products as well.

In this post we will discuss the benefits of selling on the marketplaces, such as Amazon, Buy.com, and Overstock.com, and what sorts of advantages a merchant can get here as compared to the CSE’s.

1. Potential Traffic is Limitless – The charts below, generated courtesy of Google trends and Alexa respectively demonstrates just how much more traffic the mother of all retailer websites, Amazon gets than all the rest–in fact, the traffic that all the shopping engines fails to even come close to how much traffic Amazon gets, combined. The number of potential eyeballs just to have access to your products can be overwhelming.
   
2. Rev Share Models Make Sure You Don’t Overspend – One of the major hassles of managing a CSE campaign is getting wasted clicks that don’t amount to anything that the merchant is forced to pay for anyway. With a marketplace such as Amazon, each click that your product generates is completely free of charge, and you only pay Amazon a fee (usually 15%) when a transaction is successful.
3. Cost of Sale % Remains a Constant – Cost of sale % (defined as spend/revenue) can often fluctuate on a daily/weekly/monthly basis on the shopping engines. Depending on a merchant’s margin of revenue, a target COS% can be anywhere from 5 – 25%, and generally the more constant and predictable the value, the better. With Amazon a merchant is essentially guaranteed a 15% COS on all products sold, which may be an overall improvement, or a minor (but predictable) drop off.
4. Associating Your Products with Amazon – As one of the original spots to purchase items online, the name “Amazon” is associated with reliability and quality. It’s a spot where a customer expects to purchase high quality goods combined with a high level of service. You can be sure then that if a customer finds your product, he/she will generally feel safer purchasing through what they think is Amazon.

In fact a lot of consumers won’t even realize they’re purchasing from a 3rd party when they go through Amazon, as they won’t go toward your landing pages at all. Compare this to a typical CSE where a consumer has to click through to a merchant’s landing page in order to complete the purchase.It can almost be thought of as franchising the Amazon name for your products.

Of course, there are a few catches when listing on a marketplace that may be a bit problematic for merchants who are only used to listing on the shopping engines.

Since merchants who post on the marketplaces are essentially piggybacking on the Amazon (or Buy.com or Overstock) name, they expect as a high level of service to be provided as they would with Amazon.

This means that each product has to be highly detailed in accordance with the marketplaces specifications–that is to say certain specifications cannot be omitted when sending a data feed (generally the shopping engines aren’t as strict). For certain merchants who’s data feeds aren’t very dynamic, this can cause issues with the initial feed if a merchant cannot provide these specifications for their products.

Secondly, and this is perhaps the most important detail–merchants must uphold a certain level of positive feedback in order to stay listed on Amazon. Once feedback levels drop below a certain threshold, Amazon reserves the right to delist or even blacklist a merchant from posting on their site again.

It is important to stress then that if you are a merchant thinking of listing on Amazon, be sure that you are:

• capable of handling an increase in orders
• able to ship out all your listed products in a timely fashion and that everything is in inventory

There have been occasions where a merchant gets a sudden, unexpected overload in orders that they are unable to fulfill to Amazon standards, and this minor slip-up causes their feedback to drop suddenly. And once a merchant falls below that threshold and gets delisted, it can become extremely difficult to be able to list on there again.

In essence then–not only can it be a maze to get listed, but to stay listed is no walk in the park either.

-Tien

Want to list on the engines but feeling overwhelmed? Maybe CPC Strategy can help you out Give our presentation a look through and contact us.

One of the red headed stepchildren of the comparison shopping industry, Yahoo Shopping is revamping their site in an effort to join the others as a legitimate player in the field according to InternetRetailer.com.

One of the main changes they’re making is adding the ability for merchants to make bids to keywords to improve their product placement/rankings on search results, which, as we’ve noted has little relevancy on the other engines and may in fact hurt your overall ROI.

The other main change is increasing their product categories from 64 to over 1,200, which will allow merchants the ability better target their products, but also create a headache when they have to categorize their products in their feeds.

Hopefully our categorization tips can come in handy if/when you need to do this.

We’ll see how these changes affect our clients on Yahoo and their overall ROI, but it certainly is step in the right direction so far.

If we could offer them one bit of advice in regards to their shopping channel though, if anyone over there happens to be listening, it would be to offer merchants the ability to track sales made by customers who come to the merchant sites through the engine.

The only way to currently handle this is through 3rd party analytics, but we would love for Yahoo to actually keep track of money going into merchants–rather than just the costs going to them.

Just a thought.
-Tien

Categorizing your products may be one of the most important, as well as difficult and tenuous of getting set up on the comparison shopping engines.

This is especially true if you’re a merchant with a high volume of products, and/or one selling items in a vastly different amount of areas.

Miscategorizations of your products can make it difficult for customers to find your products, or prevent your products from being listed at all.

While your initial data feed may contain your own product categories, each CSE contains their own set of categories which may be much more detailed and comprehensive–or it may be broader and can incorporate multiple categories of yours into just one.

For instance, one client of ours sells bedding products and is listed on NexTag, Shopzilla, and Pricegrabber. The table below shows how each of the engines break down specific bedding categories (category taxonomy files can generally be found at each engine’s websites):

As you can see from the chart, Pricegrabber has 11 categories within bedding, Shopzilla has a whopping 16, while Nextag makes life easy for merchants with just 1 category that encompasses everything related to bedding.

While we at CPC Strategy have our own mechanism for automating the categorization process, merchants have been known to go clinically insane after trying to categorize each and every last product in their feed manually, particularly with engines that break everything down into so many categories.

Here are a few tips we have for such merchants:

• Populate Field Initially – Use the most generic category to populate each product. For example for Shopzilla categorize each item under “miscelaneous bedding”, just to be sure that you don’t leave any category fields blank when you send in the feed.
• Break Down Fields From There – After you find a general category for each product, go through each specific category that each engine has, and apply it to each product where it applies. For instance fill in all your bedding sets with the above, then bedskirts, bedspreads, etc. Excel’s autofilter function comes extremely handy here.
• Search for Product on Engine for Ideas – If you have no idea where a category should be categorized, a search for that product into an engine lead you to a similar product that another merchant may be selling, and from there you can extract what category that particular product is listed under.

Overall process can take anywhere from minutes, to hours depending on the number of products you have, how diverse your listings are, what engine you’re categorizing for, and your level of patience

If you have any tips of your own on categorizing your products, be sure to post them in the comments below.

Tien