Understatement of the year? Perhaps. However, it’s a legitimately good statement that most advertising platform users are not very aware of what the average consumer looks like on a given platform. Recently, Shopping.com was kind enough to issue some information about their users. Great data, and worth taking a look at:

• Young: Median age is 45
• Affluent: Median income is $70K+
• Educated: 61% are college grad/post grad educated
• Balanced: a 60/40 split of females (60) and males (40)
• Active buyers: 70% bought online in the last 30 days

For age, if you are familiar with Harry S. Dent’s research (if not, check it out), then you know age is extremely important when calculating what a person will spend. The median age for Shopping.com is an excellent indicator that the average person on this site is old enough to make a decent amount of money, and young enough to have things and people to spend that money on instead of conserving for retirement. The median income is also tied into the concept that users on Shopping.com have the resources to do something with the income online since they are likely have disposable amounts of that income to use. The amount of educated users is interesting as well. It would make sense that if a person has spent the time and effort to complete school, they may be inclined to perform a good amount of research before a purchase is made. It’s an interesting theory, but it’s more likely correlated to the income distribution. That is, if you have money, it’s probably because you are educated.

The gender equity is important. Some sites like SHOP.COM slant heavily female, while Shopping.com has more of an even split. Important depending the product selection being advertised, and this case balanced enough reach both Full Moon and football enthusiasts.

In my opinion, the best part of the data is the online shopping bit, where 70% have purchased in the past 30 days. Since there are still people who have not purchased online, and more importantly, people who may not have purchased recently, this is wonderful indicator showing that on average the majority of people viewing a Shopping.com advertisement, are those viewers ready and willing to pull the trigger.

Since I don’t have data like this available on other shopping engines, I will be following up with a post on breaking down the demographics or other engines using Google/Double Click’s Ad Planner as a reference. As a merchant, if you can’t see each individual out there, it’s good at least to know what the crowd looks like.

Shopping has been sending feeds to Greenzer for some time, however this effectively moves Greenzer clients to Shopping if they were not there already, and also creates some exclusivity for Shopping in pulling traffic to their network.

In terms of the general landscape of shopping engines, a couple of conclusions can be drawn from this, both of which are not new. First, making a shopping engine work is a hard business (both financially and technically). Second,  consolidation is here, as the shopping engines will increasingly be a handful of isolated large companies with only some fringe players in the near future.  (Unless some engine does something revolutionary? Any takers?)

A final theory on eco-shopping can be put together, and this is supported by this news on Greenzer and a lot of other companies, that people do enjoy buying green products, but those people want to do the purchasing as a secondary benefit. So going eco-friendly, is not the primary motivation in purchasing, but it’s a nice benefit that will help drive the sale. It’s like buying a hybrid car with great gas mileage. It’s nice to reduce carbon emissions, but it’s even better to save at the gas pump. Ultimately the number of people looking to do ‘green’ shopping as their primary motivational driver is growing, but this segment is still a minority of purchasers.

I bring this up because that transition process will cause numerous headaches for merchants which have not yet switched over by signing up for a PayPal account and adding Shopping.com as a billing entity. Luckily, this is an easy process to do through the Shopping.com admin panel. If you as a merchant have not done this yet, then you can expect your account to potentially come down entirely until this is fixed. Last I checked, Shopping would completley change over by December so there is still some time. However, do you really want to risk your entire account coming down in the middle of Q4?

Of course not, so if you havn’t yet done this, then what are you waiting for?

For the consumer, product matching should lead to the best consumer experience by showing competing merchants offering the same item. By lining up these merchants together, a consumer should then be able to judge quickly the differences in price, reliability, brand strength of the seller, etc. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen.

To illustrate my point, I’ve picked a quick example from Shopping.com for a protein shake. I don’t want to pick on Shopping because this is not exclusively their issue. However, this is the most illustrative example of the issues I am finding more and more of recently.

You can click on the image included here to expand and see in detail what I writing about.

In this instance, a single product,  “Optimum Nutrition 100% Whey Protein Vanilla Ice Cream Gold 10.35lb” is shown. However, looking at the merchants who are selling this product quickly turn into an adventure in confusion and consternation for the consumer. Not only are different types shown, but the arrangement creates more issues. There are 20 listings total (instead of the 9 shown in the search result preview), and 13 of those listings are from Amazon. Then, looking at pricing, prices range all the way from $68.90 to $823.24. If I am a consumer, 2 things happen:

1) I am thoroughly confused
2) I conclude I should go to Amazon to look for products, not Shopping.com

Obviously, I have not even mentioned what a merchant should do here. If I were selling this product, I would do my best to try and break out my product from this listing match and move elsewhere. The downfall to that is, based on the channel’s emphasis on displaying matched listings, I will get pushed way down in results unless bidding a substantial amount.

The lesson here is that channels need to be on alert for issues in product matching and consumer experience. Having Amazon overrun merchant listings is an issue, creating relevant matches is an issue, and creating a sensible consumer experience is an issue. For merchants, the lesson is to be vigilant, and ready to alter your data and strategy, if needed to break out of bad situations.

Most engines require some type of assistance or set format. However both Shopping.com and NexTag.com offer the ability in their administrative panels to remap the data which is coming though. This can be a great benefit if data available changes, or if you just want to make sure that data is coming in properly.

Key Features

Shopping.com offers a cost allocation system where the bid is adjusted based on the quality of the traffic source within the Shopping.com network. In doing so, Shopping.com is providing a great service for their merchants because rates are adjusted by quality. Bidding is only available by category, but if the bid on the item qualifies as one of the top 6 bids,  then the product listing is given featured status. If featured status is not available due to higher bids by competing sellers, then Shopping bills the bids at the standard category level rate. This makes Shopping one of the most bid friendly engines in terms of helping their merchants.

Next, check how products are matching up to existing listings. Shopping is one of an increasing number of channels which are focusing much more heavily on matching up offers from different merchants. If a merchant knows that their products are being sold by other companies, then that merchant should be sure to review Shopping’s listings to ensure the products are matching correctly. Shopping uses primarily UPC and MPN, as well as product title, so also ensure these are correct. If sending apparel items, the flood of listings from Amazon has created a surge of size specific listings. Based on this, I would suggest reviewing how apparel items line up and consider using size based or child specific listings.

Lastly, Shopping would want me to encourage everyone to use their ROI tracker which can help monitor the quality of traffic. So consider instaling the ROI tracker (your welcome, Shopping)

Potential Hurdles

In addition to reviewing product listings for matching, also review how Shopping is categorizing items. In Shopping’s backend, there are 3 sections: ‘Categorized Correctly’, ‘May Need Review’, ‘Rejected’. If items are listed in ‘Categorized Correctly’ or ‘May Need Review’, then always spot check, but don’t worry too much – the items are most likely where they should be. If in the ‘Rejected’ section, that means these items are not displayed. You should contact Shopping on this one or check the categories being assigned within the product feed.

If you do need technical support, plan ahead. You will need to go the help and resources section in the Shopping UI, and then submit a ticket. Unlike Yahoo Shopping and Amazon Product Ads, there is no support phone number or email address offered here which has frustrated quite a few sellers. So, if a merchant has an issue and isn’t spending a large amount each month (no assigned account manager), then put in a ticket and anticipate a wait: 24-48 hours is standard.

For the next post, I will continue focusing on first tier engines: Yahoo Shopping

The Cart program was a modified version of Shopping.com, allowing merchants to sell goods on a commission based format. Shopping.com would handle the check out process with their own payment systems and relay orders back to merchants for processing.

So why the sudden change?

There are no definitive statements beyond a sentiment to move on and focus energy on Shopping.com’s cost per click program. This makes sense as the CPC program is what majority of merchants are using. On the flip side, it’s a good bet that the problems of creating an Amazon style of format of integrated suppliers going through a single checkout and then dispersing those orders, has proven to be too big of an obstacle to overcome. This process continually confounds both retailers tyring to adapt their systems and the marketplace who has to struggle to make it all happen. One of many pitfalls to this type of system is proper order integration with product variations, different shipping configurations, and finally order fulfilment. Once this is all added up, I have a feeling that Shopping.com saw mounting integration costs with too little merchant adoption.

The neatest aspect of the Cart program was the ability to have products listed on eBay Express. This still seems to the golden opportunity that eludes many merchants and what eBay would be best advised to pursue to boost sagging sales and traffic numbers. There is no word yet on what if any solution will be available to get merchants better linked in to a fixed price format on eBay. However, I guarantee you as this is being written, someone in eBay is working on this very issue.