Email the Editor 
April 4, 2006
CHANNEL FEED BASICS:
Expand Your Reach and Save Money too!
Miami, FL (April 4, 2006) – The major shopping destination sites like Yahoo! Shopping, Bizrate, Shopping.com, Pricegrabber, Nextag, Froogle, and MySimon might have you thinking that as a small-mid size online business you should send your storefront product catalog feed only to their websites, as these sites account for over 50% of all online retail sales in the USA. That same thought process is what CEO’s of companies say when they are concerned about competition and are trying to convince customers that they are the only game in town. Don’t believe them! Just as you sometimes prefer to shop at the local store that offers special services and unique product offerings as an alternative to the mall, so too are there ample number of online shoppers looking for excellent, branded products and not just the lowest price on a pair of new Nike shoes. Don’t get us wrong, it will always be difficult to compete for a customer if you charge more for the same product offering as thousands of other sites with little differentiation, BUT MerchantAdvantage has found that there are millions of people who use the many shopping destination sites to find unique store fronts and not just the same SKU listing from a giant merchant listed over and over again on the first five pages. So what do you need to do attract some of those customers and make it easier for them to find you? The following outlines the steps it takes to set up your storefront on more than one shopping destination site and the possible costs associated with each of those sites.
What to Look for When Setting up
Your Channel Feeds.
On most sites, such as Become.com, Shopzilla, Smarter.com, Shopping.com, MonsterMarketplace, Yahoo! Shopping, Bizrate, and Froogle, you will see a link at the top of the page that reads “Merchant Login,” "Sell on Our Site," or "Click Here to Join." After you click the link, complete the registration form with information about your business. These sites will also ask you for your credit card number for payment. You will also need to provide images, links, and text for your products. You might also have to negotiate a pre-arranged monthly marketing spend guarantee = BE WISE!!! Once you have decided on a site, or number of sites, your products will be cataloged on each comparison site, which you have to categorize, and then appear in search results in accordance with the following:

INCREASE YOUR PROFITS AND
REDUCE COSTS - RISK FREE!
Successful online retailers recognize the value of controlling their product feeds. That’s why they choose Channel Management to:

  • Slash submittal time from hours to minutes!
  • Send data simultaneously to multiple sites!
  • Quickly submit top selling/high profit products only where they perform!
  • Free-up valuable IT time with top channels pre-configured!
  • Add unlimited channels for no additional fee!

CLICK HERE FOR OUR 30 DAY RISK-FREE TRIAL
NO START UP FEE * ONLY $245 PER MONTH

Click Here to View our Demo

www.merchantadvantage.com

• Results Ranking: Your product placement and results page rank will be determined by how well a shopper's keyword search term matches the keywords associated with your product's title, description, and other information you provided when you registered with the site. Choosing the right keywords and being specific will help you achieve higher placement.
• Product Categories. To help customers find what they are looking for, all of the products available on a shopping site are grouped into specific product categories such as electronics, health care, apparel, sporting goods, toys, etc. Some sites automatically categorize your products as you enter them into the system and some sites also have sub-categories for your products to enable them to be accessed more quickly across a variety of search words. For instance, a wristwatch might fall under jewelry as well as watches and men’s accessories. You also can manually select product categories, but many sites often review all manual submissions before placing products on the site, so that could delay your listing. Thus, many merchants rely on specific software management tools to help them with this process.
Fees
 BE CAREFUL!!! MerchantAdvantage highly encourages all merchants to carefully understand the fee structure and what they are exactly paying for before entering into any contract with shopping destination sites. While market exposure is important, doing it strategically while ensuring that your marketing efforts generate a strong return on investment is critical. Structuring the right deal with one, two or even ten shopping destination sites is as important as being on them in the first place.
There are a number of ways that a shopping comparison site can charge for their services. Most (and the model is not the same for everyone) charge fees starting at about $.10 per click for each product and can go up as high as $.75. They charge for inclusion on the site by:
1. Pay-Per-Click Fixed Fees. You pay a predetermined per-click fee for each category in which you list a product, and you're only charged when a shopper clicks through to your site. Remember that you will be charged even if that shopper doesn't make a purchase from your site = Manage expectations and ensure you have the proper channel management tool in place to ensure that you can pull down non performing products immediately.
2. Pay-Per-Click Bidding. Bidding systems give you more control over where your product is ranked on a results page. While you usually can generate better results with this type of payment system, it is often more expensive than fixed-fee placement — especially if you enter products into popular categories. Just as with fixed fees, you're only charged when someone clicks through to your site = Again be careful and ensure that you know: your max marketing spend; your anticipated return on that marketing spend; and that you have the tools in place to track and test your campaign on a shopping destination site so you can make changes on the fly as need be.
Most merchants often ask the logical question of: “Why can’t I structure a deal on a revenue share basis, why do I have to pay upfront for clicks?” The simple answer, for now, is that the shopping destination sites are a business too and a pure revenue share model with the merchant puts all of the risk on the shopping destination sites, as they have a lot of upfront infrastructure and management costs to support before revenues from merchant’s customers are realized and collected. The next question from all of us is: “Will this ever change?” No one knows, and the answer is that only Froogle can afford to front-end that risk. And we know why they can afford it now, don’t we?
MerchantAdvantage Wrap Up:
Don’t buy into the myth that only one, two or even four shopping destination channels are your only options. There are over 100 options and you should test them. And when you do decide on the channels that you might want to try and market in, understand their fee structure, what you can get with the marketing budget you have allocated, and that you have the software capabilities to test products and pull down feeds immediately if they are not performing.

PAGE TOP

 





“MerchantAdvantage is here to be your partner in growing your business in the ever growing and more complex world of online shopping. We are here because you are online.”

Michael Lambert, CEO
 


• Shopzilla.com experienced the sharpest gain in traffic among the top 10 online shopping sites in January, with visits rising 61% to 19.2 million from 11.9 million a year earlier, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

• Target experienced the second largest increase in traffic, with visits rising 42% to 18.6 million from 13.1 million in January 2005; followed by Amazon, up 22% to 42.8 million from 35.1 million; BestBuy.com, up 22% to 14.3 million from 11.7 million; Wal-Mart Stores, up 20% to 18.4 million from 15.3 million; Shopping.com Network, up 10% to 18.73 million from 17.09 million; Dell, up 10% to 18.4 million from 16.8 million; and eBay, up 9% to 55 million from 50.3 million.

• Two sites experienced a drop in visits: Yahoo Shopping, with visits dropping 22% to 13.9 million from 17.8 million, and Expedia, with visits falling 4% to 16.2 million from 16.9 million.

• The top sites in number of visits was eBay, Amazon, Shopzilla.com Network, Shopping.com Network, Target, Dell, Wal-Mart, Expedia, BestBuy.com, and Yahoo Shopping.



Categorization Strategies
When feeding your products to shopping comparison sites, it is important to remember that a merchant should focus on certain strategies to apply to their data so it may be seen where it will get the best response. Following are two strategies to help get your products seen by more people who are visiting the shopping comparison sites.

• Strategy 1 Get your products categorized where there are fewer items of the same type.
1. Research the Search Comparison sites (yes, one at a time) where the least saturation of products occurs within your target category.
2. Then, see how you can fit your product into the least saturated category.
3. Finally, convert your product category to the category structure where YOU want your product to appear and feed.
Example – CD players might show up in Personal Audio Product, or Audio Devices et al. By categorizing your CD players as which ever category has the fewest CD players you will get a larger percentage of the shoppers looking for CD players within that category.

• Strategy 2 Get your products seen where there are shoppers already going. If your products are competitive in price or have something special that stands out, find the category that is saturated. List your products there. If people are shopping for your products in that specific category, list it.
1. Research the Search Comparison site (one at a time again) where the most saturation of products occurs on the category level. This is also typically where most of the consumers will go for this product.
2. Then see how you can fit your product into the most saturated category.
3. Remember to use keywords or “stand-out” information that separates your store from the rest of the online stores appearing at the shopping comparison site.
Summary – The first method allows you to get a larger piece of a smaller pie, and the second method allows you to get a smaller piece of a larger pie.