Shopping aggregator or comparison shopping sites are big business. Research conducted a few years ago showed that in the United States nearly 50% of consumers went to an aggregator site before making an online purchase.
What the percentage is in Australia I can’t say, but it does seem that although Australian’s love their brands, price sensitive shoppers do like to visit an aggregator before buying online.
My personal experience with price comparison websites has been overwhelmingly positive, with one site in particular enjoying a conversion rate of 18% and an extremely high ROI.
The main advantage is the fact that you can feed your brand and your products directly into comparison sites where active consumers are shopping.
At the end of the day, it’s all about reach.
Again, from personal experience, Myshopping.com.au has a very strong system of reporting, including conversion tracking so you can accurately measure your ROI, etc.
They fall down a little on the ‘bid management’ side of things where, (a bit like Google AdWords), you bid for each click. The problem seems to be that when you bid more to get your products higher in the Myshopping search results, it can take a long time for your products to climb higher in the ‘rankings’. It almost seems like a manual process!
Basically, if you want to get all, or some of your products and specials into sites like Myshopping or Getprice (the two main Australian shopping comparison sites) you’ll need to create a ‘feed’ which they pick up from your site and use to power their search or display results.
The Australian built Ezimerchant shopping cart has the ability to create feeds for many local and international comparison sites automatically, which is very handy.
In short, give it a try, and all things being equal, you should see some extra sales coming through each month. And that can’t be a bad thing!
Please share with us if it has or hasn’t worked for you…
Please note, I’m off on holidays as of next week and will resume my ‘Ask the Expert’ duties mid August!
Until then…
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Chris Thomas heads Reseo, a search engine optimisation company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.
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