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Amazon Bans Refurbished Ink and Toner Cartridges
Posted by CPC_Andrew - August 13, 2010 at 8:58 am
AuctionBytes.com reports that effective September 10, 2010 refurbished ink and toner cartridges will violate Amazon’s Condition Guidelines. For the complete story click here.
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. You can check out our webpage at www.cpcstrategy.com. Don’t hesitate to Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.
Categories: Amazon Tags:
Amazon Product Ads Rolls Out New Bidding Model
Posted by CPC_Andrew - August 10, 2010 at 9:42 am
Recently Amazon Product Ads released a new bidding model. This model is much like that of Shopping.com’s that takes into account various price points of specific categories. The following is a message sent out to Amazon Product Ads retailers.
Dear Product Ads seller,
On September 30, 2010, we will be changing to a new, more flexible cost-per-click pricing model that takes into account the price of the advertised product. We believe the new model will better align our minimum bid structure with the price of the product you advertise to make Products Ads an even more efficient marketing channel for you. If you have either stopped advertising lower priced products through Product Ads in the past or have decided not to advertise lower priced products due to cost concerns, we recommend that you consider listing those products under the new pricing model.
Under the new pricing model, each product category will be divided into three price tiers based on the price of the product being advertised. For example, the “Baby Products” category will be divided into three subcategories that consist of (1) baby products priced under $25 (with a minimum bid amount of $.10 CPC), (2) baby products priced between $25 to $50 (with a minimum bid amount $.25 CPC), and (3) baby products priced over $50 (with a minimum bid amount $.50). This will give you the opportunity to list more selection across all price points.
To see what this new pricing model will look like and edit your bids prior to September 30, 2010, go to https://sellercentral.amazon.com/advertiser/biddingUI/?itemID=200137680 (log in required). If you do not change your bids (in the Manage New Bids Section) by September 30, 2010, they will be automatically set to the new minimum bids, so please consider whether the new minimum bid amounts are acceptable to you.
Bids set in the new pricing model will be reflected in your Performance by SKU reports and in your invoices generated after September 30, 2010.
If you have concerns about the new pricing model or changes to your minimum bid amounts, or you believe you have been overcharged, please contact our support team using the Contact Seller Support link located at the bottom of any page in your Seller Central account.
Best Regards,
The Amazon Product Ads team
This change will help you lower your cost of sale percentage, especially if you sell inexpensive products in traditionally expensive cost-per-click (CPC) categories. Amazon Product Ads, recently named the best converting comparison shopping engine but also the engine with the highest average CPC rates, is taking proactive steps to improve the marketing channel they provide to merchants. If you don’t have your products listed there, do so today.
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. You can check out our webpage at www.cpcstrategy.com. Don’t hesitate to Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.
Amazon Product Ads adds New Features
Posted by Tien Nguyen - January 20, 2010 at 3:37 pm
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.
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. You can check out our webpage at www.cpcstrategy.com. Don’t hesitate to Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.
Categories: Amazon Tags:
Yahoo Shopping Introduces iPhone App
Posted by Tien Nguyen - November 17, 2009 at 3:55 pm
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
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. You can check out our webpage at www.cpcstrategy.com. Don’t hesitate to Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.
Categories: Amazon, Yahoo Shopping, eBay Tags:
Sample Data Feeds and Feed Specifications for Comparison Shopping Engines
Posted by Nii Ahene - October 7, 2009 at 10:21 am
Below you’ll find both sample data feeds and links to data feed specifications for the major shopping engines (As of 10/3/2009). It’s highly recommended that you read over the latest specification at the engine resource site before deploying the feeds for your campaigns.
-Nii
Google Base/Google Product Search
- Sample Data Feed for Google Base/Google Product Search
- Google Base/Google Product Search Data Feed Specifications Page
Shopzilla
- Sample Data Feed for Shopzilla
- Shopzilla Data feed Specifications Page
Pricegrabber
- Sample Data Feed for Pricegrabber
- Pricegrabber Data feed Specifications Page
Nextag
- Sample Data Feed for Nextag
- Nextag Data feed Specifications Page
Shopping.com
- Sample Data File for Shopping.com – Varies By Category, see Specification Page
- Shopping.com Data Feed Specifications Page
Bing Shopping
- Sample Data Feed for Bing Cashback
- Bing Cashback Data Feed Spcifications Page
Yahoo Shopping
- Sample Data Feed for Yahoo Shopping
- Yahoo Shopping Data Feed Specification Page (Must be a Yahoo Shopping Merchant to View)
Become
- Sample Data Feed for Become.com
- Become Data feed Specifications Page
Smarter.com
- Sample Data Feed for Smarter
- Smarter Data feed Specifications Page
Pronto
- Sample Data Feed for Pronto
- Pronto Data Feed Specifications Page
Amazon Product Ads
- Sample Data Feed for Amazon Product Ads
- Amazon Product Ads Data Feed Specifications Page (Need to have an Amazon Product Ads account to View)
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. You can check out our webpage at www.cpcstrategy.com. Don’t hesitate to Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.
Categories: Amazon, Become, Bing, CSE Management, Cashback, Google Base/Shopping, Nextag, Pricegrabber, Pronto, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, Smarter.com, Yahoo Shopping, bidding Tags: Feed Specifications
Amazon Product Ads Now Supports Google Base format, new Attributes
Posted by Tien Nguyen - July 21, 2009 at 10:07 am
It wasn’t too long ago that Amazon Product Ads was a rather low-key source of traffic and sales–due in large part to their lack of FTP, but they’ve picked up much steam as of late and has the potential to become a near top tier engine solely through the amount of traffic they receive.
Recently they’ve made it easier for merchants currently on other CSE’s to submit their products onto their platform by allowing feeds in Google Base format to be submitted into their system. This helps save merchants time and effort in having to create a fresh feed specifically for Amazon.
Merchants can also take the opposite approach now and add additional columns in the feed they’re sending to Amazon:
Product Ads is now able to accept over 30 new fields in your feed. Adding content to your product pages helps increase the visibility of your products on Amazon.com. You can now include information like Brand, Department, Manufacturer and Manufacturer Part Number.
You can now also add multiple images, keywords, and include bullet points of important product information to build detailed product pages.
As is generally the case with product feeds, the more specific merchants can get with their the information provided in their data feed, the better and more qualified traffic they are likely to get.
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. You can check out our webpage at www.cpcstrategy.com. Don’t hesitate to Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.
Categories: Amazon Tags:
A Couple Amazonian Tidbits
Posted by Tien Nguyen - January 24, 2009 at 3:34 pm
There’s a couple of good things coming out of the Northwestern retailer.
With grim news all around for retailers, the expectations on Wall Street were an earnings decline for Amazon during the past quarter, but they were able to buck the trend and report highly favorable numbers, not long after reporting their best numbers ever.
As a result Amazon closed up 17.6% on Friday, proving that online retail, at least in this case, is still going strong as people hunt for as many bargains as they can.
In other news, a long awaited feature from Amazon has finally arrived, dealing with their Amazon Product Ads line.
While known primarily for a one stop retail shop, as well as being a marketplace in which users buy from 3rd party merchants directly on Amazon’s site, their Product Ads line is the lesser known, PPC/CPC program, in which the process is more similar to the way comparison shopping works.
More information can be found on Amazon’s site, but essentially the ads are displayed on the side, and once a user clicks through, they are taken to the merchant’s site (as they would on a shopping engine) and in turn the merchant pays Amazon a fee for it.
Up until now then the only way a merchant can submit a feed is through their own browser, which was much less practical for any merchant with a sizable amount of products that required constant updating–but now Amazon has released an FTP feature which practically all major CSE’s currently have, and do.
FTP (File Transfer Protocol) Support for Product Ads uploads, our most-requested feature, is now live! You may now use FTP to send us your Product Ads data files. With FTP, you can schedule uploads so that your ads are always up to date.
Currently Product Ads is lesser known in the markets, and can probably be described as a combination of PPC advertising, such as Google Adwords, since they’re contextual based–as well as comparison shopping, since people searching on Amazon are looking to purchase items anyway.
This presents a great opportunity for merchants looking to expand their campaigns, if for no other reason than Amazon’s shear traffic numbers.
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. You can check out our webpage at www.cpcstrategy.com. Don’t hesitate to Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.
Categories: Amazon, Q4 Shopping Tags:
Amazon’s 2008 Holiday Season: Best Ever.
Posted by Tien Nguyen - January 12, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Well it’s a happy holiday for at least one online retailer out there, as Amazon is reporting that it’s 2008 shopping season is it’s greatest ever, in spite (or perhaps because) of the state of the economy.
With the wallets of consumers being a bit tighter this year, and with the tech saviness of the average shopper increasing, more and more are going online to find bargains that they would otherwise not find in retail stores.
It will be interesting to see how other channels of retail, both online and off have fared during this season. We’ve already seen a major spike in traffic for the top retail sites–and if all goes as expected, this may be the definitive point where we truly see online shopping become a true alternative to brick and mortar shopping.
Even if the economy booms again, people may just rather enjoy shopping with their mice and having all the inventory of the world at their hands, rather than heading out to crowded malls, dealing with hectic traffic, only to see items on their shopping list be out of stock.
The next few years will certainly be some to keep your eye on.
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. You can check out our webpage at www.cpcstrategy.com. Don’t hesitate to Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.
Categories: Amazon, Q4 Shopping Tags:
Comparison Shopping Engines vs. Marketplaces
Posted by Tien Nguyen - July 7, 2008 at 12:09 pm
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.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. You can check out our webpage at www.cpcstrategy.com. Don’t hesitate to Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.
Categories: Amazon, Buy.com, Overstock, marketplace Tags:
