Nextag

Comparison Shopping Engine News: NexTag Focused on International Growth

 Posted by CPC_Andrew - August 24, 2010 at 8:04 am

Yesterday NexTag announced the hire of three senior executives and a global P&L team to leverage opportunities for future growth. This news comes weeks after NexTag made the move to acquire the product recommendation engine, Wize.

“We’re moving aggressively to fulfill NexTag’s mission to be an indispensible shopping resource for consumers as well as a value-added marketing partner for merchants and manufacturers,” said Jeffrey G. Katz, Chief Executive Officer of NexTag.  “Our strategy for meeting these goals includes international growth, new service features and top-tier talent to execute our vision.  These new hires provide energy and fresh perspective necessary to help us seize the major opportunities we see ahead for the comparison shopping category; equally importantly, our existing senior managers provide stability and deep domain expertise to ensure that we continue to maximize the core strengths which have been integral to our success and profitability for more than a decade.”

For the complete story, click here.

It’s good to hear that NexTag continues to expand. Broadening their customer base and reaching out globally is a trend we’ve been seeing with a number of e-commerce companies. Internet Retailer just recently released an article that compliments NexTag‘s move, which reports the global online population will increase by 43% by 2014.

NexTag Announces Rate Changes Effective June 16, 2010

 Posted by CPC_Andrew - June 3, 2010 at 11:22 am

Side by side comparison of old rates to new (click to enlarge):

A rate hike in the summer is not as common as one during the winter when sales pick up. Merchants will have to increase conversion rates in order to sustain their ROI.

We’ll keep an eye on how these new rates affect merchant campaigns and if other Comparison Shopping Engines follow suit.

As a positive, NexTag announced the addition of 19 new categories to their website.

This addition helps better organize product listings and will increase conversions by sending merchants more qualified leads.

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.

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.

Nextag Adds Ability to Track by Category, Bidding History

 Posted by Tien Nguyen - January 6, 2010 at 4:17 pm

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.

Listing Promotional Messages on the CSEs

 Posted by Tien Nguyen - November 4, 2009 at 3:58 pm

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”

Nextag to Increase Rates by 25% Across the Board

 Posted by Tien Nguyen - October 22, 2009 at 12:39 pm

Nextag has just announced that they’ll follow in Pricegrabber’s footsteps and increase and raise rates by 25% across all categories:

The holiday season is around the corner and we would like to inform you that NexTag will be increasing your costs per click by 25% for all categories and all bids effective November 4, 2009 through January 6, 2010.

This change will affect all your clicks from NexTag. For example, if you have a bid of $0.60 per click, you will be charged a fee of $0.75 per click during this seasonal period. Your actual costs per click will be accurately reflected on your cost reports, but the bids will be displayed in the bidding tools without the 25% included until January 6, 2010.

This marks the last of the paid top tier shopping engines to announce how they’ll handle CPC rates for Q4, with nothing too surprising being announced.

We don’t anticipate to hear news of any rate increases from Google Product Search.

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)

Nextag Rolling Out Marketing Message Options

 Posted by Tien Nguyen - June 25, 2009 at 12:29 pm

There’s only so much a merchant can do to separate themselves on the CSE’s from the masses in the eyes of potential customers.

The three main things that can catch a customer’s attention is generally a low price, high feedback ratings, and perhaps a logo from a recognizable brand such as Sears or Staples.

Nextag then is introducing a new way to allow merchants to separate themselves from others who list their products along theirs.

Merchants will now have the opportunity to highlight any price (similar to Shopzilla), shipping, or tax discounts, along with rebate information–as well as have the ability to convey any type of message they’d like about their products at a cost of $0.05 additional per click.

For example if a merchant is having a Father’s day sale in which they offer a 20% on items over $50, or if they’re willing to provide free shipping for all items, they can do it through the Nextag bidding system. All that needs to be filled out is the details of the deal, along with the dates that a merchant wants it to run through (see below for an example):

We’re also told that Nextag will also provide a method for merchants to do this through their feeds as well.

How much this will help out merchants on the CSE’s is something we plan on keeping an eye on, but studies have shown that consumers love to save money, and that free shipping is a particular great attention grabber:

In a 2008 survey conducted by PayPal and comScore, 43 percent of shoppers said they abandon their shopping carts because of unexpectedly high shipping charges. Forrester Research reports that 61 percent of online shoppers prefer to shop with a retailer that offers free shipping than one that doesn’t.

Source: Ecommerce guide

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New Holiday Categories for NexTag

 Posted by Tien Nguyen - November 1, 2008 at 3:26 pm