Shopping search engines

Shopping search engines, or price comparison websites, have become increasingly popular with the price conscious shopper, so that any retail website should consider adding their product listings to these tools in order to generate site visits directly to individual products. Most of these sites operate on a pay-per-click basis and provide a number of features to enhance your store's rankings and traffic. They can be a very effective way to increase your market coverage and to shift some product!

Some of the main shopping search engines are:

Google Product Search

First launched in the US in 2002 and originally known as Froogle, Google's Product Search website can't be ignored as it has become a major force in the shopping and product search market. Although this service has become well-established in the US and UK, it was only offered to retailers in Australia during 2011. Like many Google products, this tool is likely to become a significant player in the market as a short list of results from this service are often included within the first page of Google's main search results, plus AdWords advertisers can integrate their product listings as part of their sponsored ad panels.

Getting your products ranking well within the Google Product Search results can be difficult in the more general product categories, as the results tend to be dominated by large established retailers. However, many of the principles of search engine optimisation apply to these results as well and therefore the product feed submitted to this search tool needs to include optimised product names and descriptions, plus the submission of listings must be updated on a frequent basis to ensure listings remain current and accessible.

GetPrice

Claiming to be the largest comparison shopping network in Australia, Getprice covers a wide range of product categories and charges retailers on the pay-per-click basis for website traffic. This site is also well optimised and uses search engine marketing as a core strategy to drive consumers onto the site, and then off to the participating retailers. Getprice also provides results for a number of shopping channels, including MSN Shopping, Yahoo Shopping, Choice, C-Net, PC World, Good Gear Guide and Taste.

Shopping.com

This site is part of eBay and one of the first online price comparison websites. Shopping.com provides product listings across a wide range of categories and retailers, plus the listings are also used by other retail sites in their network.

MyShopping

MyShopping is another prominent site in the Australian shopping search market and tends to have a smaller list of competing retailers for each product category, so results from this service can be effective.

All of the above sites list product information from a range of participating retailers, allowing users to sort and compare products by price and category. Therefore price competitiveness is important to be sucessful and you need to be aware of how your products compete on a regular basis. To get your products listed you need to set up a regular datafeed to each of these services with your product information and any images, although this is not as complicated as it sounds!

If you sell products online and would like to know more about using these comparison shopping sites, including Google Product Search engine, please contact us for more information or you can request a FREE website assessment to see how well your website currently performs.