Archive for March, 2010

Effects of Pricegrabber Post Yahoo Partnership

 Posted by Tien - March 31, 2010 at 10:14 pm

It’s been almost 3 weeks since Yahoo Shopping became an official co-brand of Pricegrabber, meaning all shopping results from Yahoo Shopping was produced via Pricegrabber feeds.

There are two main factors that a merchant should be concerned about regarding the switch: traffic and conversion.

We initially theorized that merchants on Pricegrabber will see an increase in traffic (by way of Yahoo Shopping users), accompanied by a drop in conversion rates since historically we’ve seen that Yahoo Shopping traffic doesn’t convert nearly as well as some of the other major engines, such as Pricegrabber.

In practice though?

That’s what we sought to find out.

The Study

Our goal was to analyze some of our clients’ campaign data since the change took place (March 11th), and compared it to the same period prior to the change.

We also compared the same merchants to their campaigns on another major shopping engine, Nextag, in order to normalize the data and remove any seasonal bias of that particular merchant.

Traffic Change

Below is a chart of eight merchants from various industries detailing the % change from when the change was made (March 11 to March 30) compared to the 20 days prior (Feb 19 – March 10):

We can observe two things from this chart:

a) While some merchants saw relatively a flat increase/decrease in traffic on Nextag, some of those saw a very dramatic rise on Pricegrabber, which can be attributed in large part to being listed on Yahoo.

b) For merchants that experienced significant drops on both engines (due to seasonality) of their products, the drop on Pricegrabber was less significant than on Nextag, which again may be Yahoo Shopping consumers mitigating the drop off for Pricegrabber.

Conversion Change

The other important factor that a merchant should be concerned with as we mentioned above is conversion, or cost of sale % (cost/revenue).

The chart below represents a merchant’s change in COS, so if in the period prior to the change they had a 20% COS, then post-change they got 16%, they would be noted as having a change of -4%:

The results here are less conclusive than the ones above. There are both cases of the Nextag merchants seeing a greater decrease in COS %, as well as vice versa.

Overall though Nextag merchants saw a greater decrease in COS, and even seeing drops when the same Pricegrabber merchant saw an increase.

Conclusion

We should always be careful to make any gross conclusions from analyzing traffic/conversion data from the CSE’s, as there are many factors to consider that could influence the results.

Still, given the short amount of time since Yahoo Shopping results was taken over with Pricegrabber’s, we observed that merchants seeing drops in traffic on other mediums (Nextag) that the drop was less dramatic on PG, and those who saw an increase on Nextag saw an exaggerated increase on PG.

Conversion rates were less clear, as we saw both improvements and declines from Pricegrabber as compared to Nextag in the same time period.

We will continue to monitor traffic on Pricegrabber as well as conversions to see the impact that Yahoo traffic is having on Pricegrabber.

Merchants on Google Shopping Must Now Verify their URLs

 Posted by Tien - March 23, 2010 at 12:54 pm

Google is announcing that any merchant listing on Google Merchant Center/Shopping are now required to verify their website URLs through Google Webmaster tools. Not doing so by May 18th will result in feeds being submitted to Google to be disapproved.

The steps are as follows:

1. Sign into Google Webmaster Tools with your Google Account.
2. Click Add a site, and type the URL of the site you want to add. Make sure you type the entire URL, such as http://www.example.com/
3. Click Continue. The Site verification page opens.
4. (Optional) In the Name box, type a name for your site (for example, My Blog).
5. Select the verification method you want.
   • Meta tag: We will ask you to add a meta tag with a unique value to your site’s home page. This is the easiest solution if editing your home page’s HTML is easier than uploading new files. In addition, this solution lets you easily verify sites you’ve created using Google Sites.
   • HTML file: We will ask you to upload a specific file to the top directory of your website. This option is easiest if you cannot modify the HTML of your home page but have the ability to upload files to your webserver.

The rest of the guide can be found here.

Obviously these are very important steps to take, as not doing so will result in a merchant’s feed being disapproved, and eventually be taken off of Google.

We’ve also created a video guide which breaks down the process step by step.

Nextag Offers Customizable Feedback Surveys

 Posted by Tien - March 12, 2010 at 3:48 pm

We’ve discussed in the past the importance of having good customer feedback when listing on the CSE’s, and how it can be as important as pricing in the eyes of a consumer while scanning through product listings.

In it we said that a merchant can install a feedback prompt provided by the shopping engine, in which a customer is asked to fill out a survey detailing their shopping experience.

Nextag has now taken it a step further and has started to allow merchants to create their own custom surveys.

Both the point of sale and post-fulfillment survey builders are customizable, in which a merchant can choose to be notified if their rating goes behind a certain threshold, as well as determine what questions are asked to the buyer:

We’d recommend merchants keep the surveys as simple as possible, as buyers can often be overwhelmed if too much is asked of them to fill out.

Still, this certainly provides merchants good opportunity to see what their customers are thinking as they go through the purchase process in a relatively simple matter. It a merchant does have multiple questions they want to ask though, it may make sense to cycle in and out the questions, rather than ask them all at once.

Yahoo Shopping is Officially a PriceGrabber Co-Brand

 Posted by Rick - March 11, 2010 at 8:52 am

Today is the big day!

All Yahoo Shopping product results will now be powered by PriceGrabber. If you’re still in the dark about the partnership, you can get caught up by reading Yahoo’s official announcement.

If you did not register with PriceGrabber before Jan. 19, your products are not guaranteed to show up on Yahoo Shopping today. If you still haven’t registered on PriceGrabber, you can sign-up here.

If you have any questions about the transition, make sure to check out the Yahoo! help FAQ page.

It should be interesting to see what impact the partnership will have on traffic & conversion rates for our clients and we will continue to update the blog over the next few weeks to let you know what we’re seeing.

SortPrice Helps Merchants Build Facebook Stores

 Posted by Tien - March 10, 2010 at 2:58 pm

Sortprice.com, which is a comparison shopping engine that allows merchants to list either limited portions of their feed for free, or at a flat fee for enhanced listings, has a program that lets them build Facebook stores for their merchants.

Basically a merchant on their enhanced listing program can have Sortprice build a storefront on their behalf at no extra charge.

Currently there are around 1000 Facebook stores built by Sortprice, in which users can become fans of the merchant’s page, and purchase featured products on that page.

Its main benefit is that this allows a merchant to take advantage of Facebook’s viral nature, and allows a user to notify their friends via Facebook’s News Feed that they made a purchase on that site.

Google Merchant Center Upload Issues

 Posted by Tien - March 3, 2010 at 10:19 am

Users who submit their products to Google’s Merchant Center via FTP have been recently getting this error:

Google Merchant Center problem with data feed file: “xxxxx.txt”

Dear Google Merchant Center user,

On March 3, 2010 5:10:17 AM PST you uploaded to Google Merchant Center via FTP a file named “xxxxxx.txt”, but you don’t have a data feed registered with this name. Please verify that you provided the correct file name, including correct capitalization.

It’s currently a known issue that Google is working on, and should hopefully be resolved quickly. Here is Google’s response on the issue:

We’ve noticed that a few users who have uploaded their data feeds via FTP are getting the data feed file name error. This is a known issue and our engineers are working to resolve it. In the meantime, if your data feed file size is less than 20 MB, please upload your data feeds manually. We appreciate your patience.

No word yet on a timeline on when this will be resolved, but hopefully it will be soon.

Edit: It appears the issue has been resolved, we can all go back to feeding as normal now.