Ready? Set? Search! Rev up your sales with comparison-shopping engines

Entrepreneur, Sept, 2003 by Catherine Seda

More than 50 percent of shoppers say comparison-shopping search engines save time and money, according to a January 2003 survey from online customer Satisfaction management company ForeSee Results on comparison-shopping site DealTime.com.These sites expose your products to shoppers and produce the best marketing copy: customer testimonials.

ForeSee Results discovered that while most consumers use shopping engines to compare products and prices, 25 percent of them also want to compare the reputation of online stores. BizRate, DealTime and PriceGrabber.com offer user reviews of their merchants. Customer reviews give merchants the chance to shine (or to resolve problems if customers post complaints).

"Many merchants link their Web sites to our reviews," says Tamim Mourad, CEO of PriceGrabber.com. "Happy customers like sharing their experiences with others. And consumers trust reviews on unbiased shopping engines probably more than the testimonials found on merchants' own sites."

Adding product listings to BizRate and mySimon is free, though each has requirements such as a sales volume minimum or the ability to survey your customers. DealTime and PriceGrabber.com offer a cost-per-click program in which the rate is based on the categories that list your products.

The setup process for merchants is fairly quick and seemingly painless. According to Sarah Leary, vice president of marketing for DealTime, merchants simply need to provide the list of products for inclusion (which can be automatically integrated from an online catalog), the per-click cost desired and a refundable $200 credit card deposit for the clicks. Most merchants can then expect highly qualified traffic within 48 hours.

And you'll reach a huge shopping audience. Three out of the four comparison-shopping engines receive more than 8 million visits per month. (There aren't traffic statistics for mySimon, but it's part of the CNET Network, which reaches about 55 million people monthly.) However, access to a high volume of shoppers can be overwhelming to growing businesses or those with limited inventory.

Last holiday season, DealTime received a few frantic calls from merchants. "We delivered such a large number of leads and such a large quantity of buyers and orders," says Iggy Fanlo, president of DealTime, "that several merchants turned us off temporarily because they couldn't fulfill all the orders."

An influx of orders is eagerly welcomed by most companies--except perhaps the entrepreneurs in a recent IBM commercial who were excited, then horrified, as they watched their online orders trickle in, then turn into a deluge.

But don't worry. If your sales flood your fulfillment capabilities, just temporarily remove your products from the shopping engine's storefront window. Shoppers will still be there when you reopen for business.

CATHERINE SEDA is a professional speaker (www.sedacommumcation.com) and editor of a free search engine advertising e-zine (www.keywordtextlinks.com).