Are you an e-commerce business wanting to increase sales?
Why not consider advertising your products on shopping portals, like Amazon, Shopzilla or Bizrate. Shopping portals give you the opportunity to display photos of your products to potential customers, along with a description of the product and the price. You only pay once someone clicks on your product. Below is an image of the Shopping portal Bizrate showing how our client, Ducti is using the site to list their messenger bags.
There are many benefits to Shopping Portals:
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The cost per click may ultimately be cheaper than pay per click programmes like Google.
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Customers are more targeted than other advertising means. They are using the shopping portals to buy the products that you sell.
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The shopping portals are well optimised sites and may appear in the search engines under the organic results. For example, type in the term “Cross Sportswear” into Google.co.uk. The portal Bizrate comes up with a page of retailers, including our client Golfposer.
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Shopping portals do pay per click advertising on Google, Yahoo, and MSN directing people to the pages that sell your products. For example, type in ladies golf clothing in Yahoo and Bizrate’s paid advertisements appear.
How do you get listed?
Shopping portals can be split into two categories – Free and Paid. Free shopping portals generally agree to list a business on their website in return for a reciprocal link. Paid shopping portals operate a different strategy by charging companies to be listed on their portal websites. The portals introduce a very similar system to pay per click advertising in that they charge on a cost per click basis i.e. a user clicks on a product within your listing and you are charged for that click through to your website.
Accounts and budgets for shopping portals vary in that some portals will charge you more to set up an account as opposed to others that will charge a minimum spend.
For example, the shopping portal Shopzilla (Bizrate) has a minimum spend account creation of £100 and offers continuous payment plans for companies or a do it yourself account topup on a monthly basis. Alternatively, the shopping portal Price Grabber requires £200 to open an account with a minimum £100 topup when the account is nearing its depletion.
Most paid for shopping portals require the creation of shopping feeds that allows a business to submit their entire product range to the specific portal. These feeds are created and submitted to the business’ web server to allow the portal to pick the feed up or they are submitted to the portal by File Transfer Protocol (FTP) on a weekly or monthly basis. Types of feeds include CSV, TXT and XML files.
Keys to Success
As with any form of online advertising, research and preparation will pay dividends. There are several keys to ensuring that you maximise the opportunity to generate sales within these shopping portals.
1. Use good, clear photographs of products, as you want your products to look better than your competitors
2. Offer competitive prices – You don’t necessarily need to have the cheapest products. However check out your competitors to see how your products compare in price and make sure that they aren’t far more expensive. Look at your listings through the eyes of potential customers. Does your product offer better value for money than the competition?
3. Good product descriptions and titles of your products are essential as these can help with the visibility of your products on the shopping portals and the major search engines for consumer searches.
4. Ask the Shopping portals. Most shopping portals are happy to give advice on how to optimise your product listings to generate sales
5. Ask purchasers to write reviews. It is proven that if you have good reviews, customers are more likely to buy from you than a competitor without a review.
Main Shopping Portals to consider
Below is a list of just a few of the most popular UK based shopping portal sites to consider:
www.amazon.co.uk
www.shopzilla.co.uk
www.bizrate.co.uk
www.pricegrabber.co.uk
www.kelkoo.co.uk
www.nextag.co.uk
www.ciao.co.uk
www.froogle.co.uk
Post date 03/09/2007
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