Pricegrabber

Yahoo Shopping is Officially a PriceGrabber Co-Brand

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.

Today is the last day for Yahoo Shopping merchants to get guaranteed placement on PriceGrabber

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.

Yahoo Shopping to Partner with Pricegrabber

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.

Listing Promotional Messages on the CSEs

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”

Pricegrabber, Shopzilla Announce CPC Hikes, Become.com Remains Flat

Not long after Shopping.com’s announcement of new CPC Rates, Pricegrabber and Shopzilla have this week announced their own increases, though both are taking different approaches.

From November 1 until January 15, 2010 Pricegrabber will increase rates across all categories by 25%, which is identical to what they did last year.

Shopzilla on the other hand is taking an approach more similar to that of Shopping.com’s and only increasing rates in certain categories.

The chart below shows how many of their categories are affected:

Just under half of their 443 total subcategories will not be affected at all, while just under a fourth will be subjected to a 25% rate increase.

Click here for a complete list of categories affected.

And finally to jump from one extreme to the last, Become.com has just announced that they are not going to raise rates at all during the holiday season.

Become.com is proud to announce that we are not raising our rates for the 2009 holiday season!

We recognize the need for retailers to make the most of this busy shopping season, and are happy to offer our partners our tools and features in order to help you optimize your holiday campaign

It’s a great move to encourage potential merchants to sign up on their lesser known engine, considering that most of the other big players in the market are going the opposite approach.

Sample Data Feeds and Feed Specifications for Comparison Shopping Engines

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.
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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 Cashback
- 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)

Pricegrabber Listing Discount Percentages

Pricegrabber users doing searches on items with multiple sellers are now greeted by a colorful badge detailing which merchant is selling it for the cheapest, and the discount they’re getting from the highest seller of the product.

Since one of the main reasons a consumer goes on a comparison shopping engine is to find the lowest price on a product, it certainly is useful not only for consumers but for the merchant who is selling that particular product the cheapest as well. By being highlighted as having the lowest price, a consumer may be more likely drawn to that particular merchant, making the likelihood of a converted sale higher.

However Pricegrabber’s methodology of strictly comparing the lowest price listed to the highest of that product is somewhat questionable, as it is simply comparing one outlier to another–rather than comparing it to an average of all prices.

It also takes attention away from other components such as the user rating, and can mislead users into automatically thinking that the best purchase decision would be from the lowest priced merchant, even if they’ve had questionable reviews from consumers.

That said it’s still a very useful tool and another step in the right direction in improving a consumer’s overall shopping engine experience, which ultimately is what will lead to higher return rates and more sale conversions.

Pricegrabber Deal of the Day Charts Price History

For the past month or so, Pricegrabber’s Deal of the Day page has included a chart that shows both the average price history and lowest price of that particular product, giving users a good indication of what sort of deal they’re getting on the deal:

For those who aren’t familiar–Pricegrabber’s deal of the day is similar to Woot’s One Day, One Deal experience, in which a new product is released every day at 12pm PT from a specific merchant which is generally at a much lower price than one can find anywhere else on the internet.

Thanks to Twitter user @juney for bringing this to our attention, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter as well.

When Manufacturer Names Go Wrong

Pricegrabber is No Rebel, Announces CPC Rates Raises