Chances are, if you have an online presence for your business, you are already familiar with the main players in the pay-per-click search advertising arena – Google, Yahoo and MSN. Although search engine advertising will bring visitors and buyers to your site (see our previous post on PPC advertising), you could be missing out on lots of sales if you’re not also listing your products in the shopping search engines.
Shopzilla.com is our favorite, and is one of the leading price comparison engines. Listing your products on this site will expose them to more than 30 million shoppers each month. Once you register as a merchant with Shopzilla you will be provided with the simple steps needed to upload your products, pictures and descriptions, so that they will appear in searches on their price comparison site.
Keep in mind that mostly price sensitive shoppers visit shopping comparison sites, so that they can compare similar items from different suppliers based on price. Of course, if your products are custom, handmade or one of a kind type items then there will not be much, if any, competition for them in the comparison engines. Furthermore, just because shoppers spend time comparing prices before they buy, doesn’t mean they will necessarily buy the least expensive alternative. Even if your products are high end, or more expensive than the rest, you will attract more interest in and more sales of your items by advertising in shopping comparison engines. The trick is to keep your inventory up to date with the shopping search engines to attract as many potential customers as possible.
You can get started with Shopzilla for just $50. Each time a visitor clicks on your listing the cost of that click is deducted from your balance, there are no other fees involved. Plus, the company will give you a refund if you’re not happy with the results.
There are a number of other popular shopping comparison search engine sites that you may want to advertise with as well, such as Shop.com, NexTag.com and PriceRunner.com.
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