Shopzilla has already gone back to standard rates, so this should be a prime location for pushing budget to. On the other side of the coin, some engines are not rolling back rates until January 15th, so throttles should be available if needed.

End of Holiday CPC Rate Card

• Shopzilla December 25
• Gifts.com December 31
• NexTag December 31
• Shopping.com December 31
• PriceGrabber January 15
• Pronto.com January 15

Shopping.com

Shopping continues to be the most innovative in billing, by supporting a value based rate card which fluctuates on the measured value of the traffic source that Shopping is using to drive traffic to the merchant site. The formula is defined by Shopping as the following:

 [Rate Card CPC]    x   [Publisher Quality Score]    =    [Billed CPC]

This formula paired with changing rate card CPCs by category and price level, gives Shopping a continuously variable CPC rate which is both innovative and difficult to pin down sometimes. The rate changes went into effect on May 16th, so it’s already out in the wild. The full rates can be seen at: Shopping Rate Card

Shopzilla

Shopzilla aka Bizrate, was the next domino to fall, announcing rate card changes effective June 1. Shopzilla has been good enough to provide a break down of current and effective CPC rates in June. As with many of the rate card changes on the engines, there is a mix of higher and lower CPC rates being put into place. You can find the complete review here: Shopzilla Rate Card Effective June 1

NexTag

Now the ball really gets rolling. A few days later this month, NexTag announced their rate card changes for June 1. NexTag’s changes are pretty heavy toward increases, but there are some decreases as well. Included in this change is the creation of many new categories, so merchants should be aware of the updates since this likely means a change to the product feed to include the new mappings. The NexTag taxonomy can be found here: NexTag Categories. In the update, NexTag did not including a rate card link, so merchants who are looking for new rates should check in their NexTag administrative tools.

Amazon Product Ads

Amazon followed up a few days later by announcing their rate card changes. The rate card changes have been nicely summed up by Amazon in their announcement. There are 36 categories effected, with 117 other categories left untouched. Of the 36 categories, 32 categories are seeing increases and 4 categories seeing decreases. As with NexTag, the CPC rates are located in the merchant’s admin panel, so there is no public link to provide. Amazon is also consistent on the date for the changes, which is June 1.

Become

Only a day behind Amazon, Become announced their rate card changes only a few days ago. There is no summary, so merchants should review to see what categories have been changed and how this effects overall expenses. The good news is that Become is giving more time than the others, making the changes effective June 15. The rates can be found here: Become Rate Card

Overall, any merchant who has tight controls on ROI, should keep June 1 circled on the calendar. More than likely, things will fluctuate on that day and adjustments may need to be made later on the month once the changes have a chance to yield a new pattern. Fortunately, there is no rate change on Google Product Search.

I won’t spend time echoing the study when instead I suggest reviewing SEOClarity’s .PDF yourself:

SEOClarity: Clarity Insights Google Algorithm Change 2/24/2011

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.