Phantom Listings

Many times merchants may find their products mysteriously appearing on engines which they are not using. How is this happening?

This happens because comparison engines, like stores, are pushing to stock their shelves. The reason to keep the shelves full can be broken into 2 components:

Keep consumers happy

When online shoppers are coming through a store, you want to make sure they are finding what they want. If the engine doesn’t have enough product to stock up a certain section of merchandise, then they will actively work to place product. This means looking for merchandise outside of what is currently being fed.

Making Money

Since…surprise, comparison engines are businesses, they like to make money. Hey, even I like to make money so no criticisms for that. To make money, they comparison engines need product to post and get clicks. So if the comparison engine is short on inventory in a particular section, typically this means looking to other sources. Also, if just starting out, the CSE also needs to pull in traffic so they can’t wait around for merchants to sign up.

All of this leads to the last question of…

How do the products get there?

There are a couple of methods. The main way I have seen is through affiliate networks, and many times this means the comparison engines exchanging products among each other. It’s surprising to many people that sending products to one CSE will get products listed on another, but this can, in many times, be the case. This is especially useful because it fulfills both requirements of making money and adding products.

The second way is simply by crawling. The engines can pull listings from websites on a common platform or with simple site design. This seems the easiest method, but crawling has never been ideal because anytime a site layout changes then havoc shortly follows. Crawling is usually a last resort by anyone for grabbing data.

So, if anyone was wondering how those mystery listings showed up, then now you know.

June 25th, 2008