Optimization Best Practices for Shopzilla

Shopzilla and its sister site, Bizrate, continues to be one of the prime movers among comparison shopping engines. Shopzilla pumps high volumes of traffic through to merchants, and most importantly to merchants, there are many ways to make this traffic profitable.

Key Features

One of the most important features for Shopzilla is their bidding system. As with other CSEs, Shopzilla offers the ability to bid on a product level. This is important because in a competitive environment like Shopzilla where many different retailers are competing, bidding become very important.

Using Shopzilla’s bidding UI, bids can be made on a category or product basis. The bidding UI will give a review of the top bids in given categories which gives some indication of where a merchant’s bids should be placed. With non-matching items, a progressive bidding approach is recommended (as usual). If an item is matching, then options become more limited. The results are heavily weighted toward price. To really move up the list, make sure to install the costumer surveys to help work toward featured store status, which will push listings to the top of the results. Hopefully this has already been done, because it takes a while to get there.

Continuing the bidding talk, keep in mind that a zero bidding strategy can be done with Shopzilla. However, know this is only usable for products which are very unique in comparison with Shopzilla’s selection. If more than a few merchants have a similar product, it’s just as good to remove the product from the feed if not performing.

Lastly, keep in mind the dreaded holiday increases. With minimums expected to climb the usual 20% this year for the holiday season, keep an eye on how this effects position items with bids, and also ROI across the board.

Potential Challenges

Ensure category mapping is optimal. Many Shopzilla keyword searches will display potential categories to shop in first, and then a listing of possible product matches from the entire engine. Be sure make keyword searches as a costumer would, and then place products in the most likely category to be searched in. Of course, testing is best in this case by switching category placement for products. However, let’s face it, if a merchant hasn’t done this already throughout the year, it’s not a good idea to start now.

Lastly, keep a sharp eye on traffic surges. During this time of year, and especially on a high traffic engine like Shopzilla, ROI can get out of control in a hurry. Keep a daily eye on performance trending and adjust as needed. Of course reactionary optimization is not the best tactic, but a responsive component is especially necessary in this environment where profitable
products and strategies during the course of the year, can quickly become budget killers.

Next up on the comparison engine optimization task list: NexTag

October 13th, 2008