By Comparison shopping engines (CSE’s) is becoming popular nowadays because of the advantages that it offers to the merchants in increasing sales and attracting customers. It makes the market competitive which opens the door for new challenges for the retailers.
In this article, we will understand about comparison shopping engines, how you can get your products listed on these shopping engines and some of the best platforms available to keep you updated about the market
What are the comparison shopping engines?
Comparison shopping engines are meant for gathering the entire product information such as pricing and its display along with other necessary details on a result page when shoppers push any query. This way customer can get to know about multiple sellers that sell the product of their interest and they can compare the actual price and shipping charges. They can choose the shop or retailer that is offering the best deal. Suppose I want to purchase a mobile phone in a set budget. For that, I want to know the options available and find out the best price. I can initiate my search on Google shopping which is quite a popular comparison shopping engine.
For e-commerce merchants, these shopping engines are a perfect platform to display their products in front of prospective buyers. These buyers are different from the window shoppers at malls and they just look for the best deal by using comparison shopping engines to get the best deal. These buyers are perfect audiences for the merchants who want to promote their products as they research on multiple products before buying any product.
Getting products listed on price comparison websites
Many of the price comparison engines and apps such as Fairbuy ask retailers to present a formatted product feed. This feed should be updated regularly and it should be a CSE-defined specification. The CSE uses scripts to ingest and parse the data from the product feed, displaying the appropriate information on results pages.
Shopify merchants have many apps including Fairbuy that make it easier to submit feeds to CSE’s easier automatic. Regardless of how a feed is created, smart merchants will work to optimize descriptions and prices to get the most sales possible.
The cost of comparison shopping engines
Majority of CSE’s charges based on per click or action. Sellers need to pay a particular fee amount on every click by a prospective customer on that merchant’s website. There is no pricing models that fit in all business models, therefore it is necessary to understand your audiences and set a bid accordingly.
Some of the popular Comparison Shopping Engines are:
- Google Shopping
Google Shopping is one of the widely used and well-known comparison shopping engines. Products that are sent to Google Shopping product feed will also get displayed on standard Google search results. They are also integrated with Google’s pay-per-click policy which is known as Adwords.
- Amazon Product Ads
Amazon isn’t actually a comparison shopping engine (CSE), but it works exactly the way other search engines work. When a product is registered for Product Ads, they can be uploaded manually or via FTP. Amazon automatically creates ad’ for the products after fetching them from your product feeds. After setting up some budget and a timeframe, your ads will go live and money will start getting deducted from your account based on the pay-per-click payment method.
- Nextag
This CSE is functioning since 1999 and has millions of visitors across the globe which is rising each month. It generates the maximum page traffic and conversions in CPC Strategies. You can list any products, real estate, event tickets, travel bookings, etc.
- PriceGrabber
PriceGrabber has an automated market research tool that helps retailers in estimating recent price trends, customer behavior, and purchase stats. When the products get listed on PriceGrabber, they automatically get listed on Yahoo Shopping which is an added advantage.
- Shopping.com
Shopping.com is a launch from eBay’s and it is another great platform for merchants to showcase their products in front of potential buyers. Shopping.com also merges with ‘The Find’, which is another CSE listed.
- Fairbuy
It is an app for fair wages. It was founded with a motive to deliver the best to the customers at a very fair price after comparing the product at multiple websites so the profit generated gets equally distributed till the lower level and not just get restricted to the brand owners. Fairbuy shopping app help user to find lowest price pf products from shopping app like Amazon India, Flipkart India, Paytm & Snapdeal.
- BizRate
Along with price comparisons and product displays, with BizRate customers can set price alert notifications for the products they’re interested in.
