Shopping.com and Bizrate experience

we have had feeds with bizrate and shopping.com in highly competive category for 2 years. we are just now experiencing very low conversion w/high click cost. i have tried many variations of feed tweaks only to be taken offline by comparison site techs. our competitors seemingly are using similar techniques. is there anyone out there willing to discuss their shopping.com and bizrate feed philiosophy. my business is sinking!!!!!

lmk THANKS!

For what its worth I tried both for two different sites (one for iPod accessories and one for lingerie). I carefully tracked my click thru to conversion rate and it was zero. We got no conversions on either category after something like 300 clicks. After that I suspended my account. I had high hopes that a comparison site would lead to a decent conversion rate (after all people are using the sites with a purchase in mind), but that just wasn't the case.

-Ramprof

We've been using BizRate and Shopping.com for over 2 years now and originally got great returns on both. Over the last year the ROI has steadily dropped, especially for BizRate, as the traffic has considerably increased since they are sucking free and paid search traffic off Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Basically the quality of the traffic has gone way down. We've tried a variety of approaches, including hiring a company called Quigo to take over our feed and optimize it. Nothing has really worked. I definitely do not recommend you go to a consultant to improve your performance. At least based on my experience. The big blind spot for us is knowing where our phone sales are generated. We have just completed building our own in house solution that tags detailed product pages for the source that brought a customer to our site. Our customer service rep than asks for the unique identifier when taking the order and we now can tell overall how much sales and margin we are getting from each marketing source and for BizRate and Shopping.com (and NexTag, Price Grabber, YahooShopping, and others) down to the product level. I think this is the only real way to manage the campaigns. Know total traffic, costs and total sales (phone and web) down to the product level and either remove products that aren't performing or change prices on those products.

The other BIG step you can take to improve your performance on comparison shopping sites is to become a highly rated and certified merchant. For BizRate this means getting that lame looking green smiley face. Now this is something I have NOT been able to do. I have a good customer rating but cannot seem to get enough customer surveys over the required rolling 90 day period to hit the target.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

It is a waste of money to advertise anywhere if you are not tracking your ROI (return on investment). Every marketing campaign needs to be measured unless you have too much money to burn. I have experience working with most price comparison companies and currently employed by PriceComparison.com, we have an ROI tool for customers to use.
Something different that is coming on the horizon is the fact that price comparison sites like PriceComparison.com are supporting commission based / performance based marketing like affiliate network industry.
Performance based will be better for merchants since it is much less risk.

Andrew
http://www.PriceComparison.com

I use both bizrate.com and shopping.com with a feed I generated from our product database. Conversion costs are high but not non-existent in my industry. We just met this morning to decide whether to kill the program or not.

For you it really matters how much you are willing to pay/conversion.

If you are already profitable and above your fixed costs then the program might be an acceptable suppliment to other online advertising venues. If this is your sole source of income then look into Google Adwords, Overture, and MSN marketing. Your cost/conversion should be much lower in these arenas.

Better spending our money in the search engines I have thought about using them but when I view the sites it just isn't worth the cost to try and be the cheapest. Heck why bother I can go broke not selling somthing slower than I can selling something and not making any money when I do sell it.

Good point. You really have to be the lowest price to thrive in these venues. It is quite easy for a consumer to price you up quickly and if someone else plays a better game then there is not much you can do.

We've been using shopping.com for about 2 years on 2 sites (pet related products). Traffic quality and consistency has taken anose dive in the past 2 months. Our C.R.'s have gone from 3-4% to <0.5%.

We are also noticing WILD swings in traffic coming from these sites. About once a week we have an "outlier" day where our traffic (and cost) goes up 20-30x's normal from shopping.com. This used to happen about once every 2 months and we could live with that, but once a week?

Tech support said they are investigating, but i agree with bwn in that why should we lose money AND have to ship product. We're giving them 1 month to correct and then we're out.

I have been using shopzilla but I haven't had any conversions. I run a magazine website and I think there are just too many other sites out there on shopzilla and if someone can get it a a nickel cheaper elsewhere they will. I guess it's that way anywhere.

Justin