Shopzilla Bidding Latency

Using Shopzilla’s Bidding mechanism provides an additional way to manipulate listings, but does have a time lag which needs to be considered.

One of many differences between using comparison engines and more traditional online marketing channels like Google Adwords, is the the time delay in making bidding changes. This recently became an issue for me when investigating making regular changes in bidding strategy.

Much like daytrending in the SEM world, I was looking to change bidding based on the time the listings were active. However, doing this with a CSE is more like week trending. I was looking to decrease ad spend over the weekend, when the client’s ROI was typically much lower than a weekday.

For Shopzilla, they will reflect bidding changes to product listings within an hour time period. However, this can only be done using Shopzilla’s interface in the account’s control panel. If you are looking to change bidding startegies through the product feed (allowing for item specific changes), then bids can take up to 48 hours to update. In my case, this effectively killed any chance to allow a weekend bidding strategy.

So when manipulating bids on Shopzilla, keep this in mind. Don’t look at the next day’s numbers as proof of concept, unless you are making adjustments directly through Shopzilla’s UI.

June 9th, 2008