Yahoo Product Submit Adding Bidding Mechanism

Yahoo Shopping, aka Yahoo Product Submit, will be adding a bidding mechanism within the next couple months. So what does this mean?

If you are a retailer, it means you getting more options. Yahoo has until now ranked items based on keyword relevancy, categorization, click history, and costumer feedback. With the adoption of a bidding mechanism, Yahoo will create more competition and more flexibility in terms of how merchants may list their products. Listing has been difficult for some merchants who struggle to get traffic in Yahoo’s large database of products. Implementing this feature will mean merchants how have not been able to gain significant history, and thereby rankings, can now push their items to the top of result pages.

If you are watching Yahoo in general, this is a welcome sign. Yahoo used to host the premier comparison engine but has lagged behind in the last couple of years. Innovations have been few and far between, traffic has been tepid, and retailers have seen flat sales overall. This bidding introduction shows a renewed effort to bring Yahoo into the present with a bidding type of algorithm that has been widely adopted by most other major comparison shopping engines, from Shopping to Shopzilla to NexTag.

So retailers and industry watchers take note, perhaps Yahoo intends to play a bigger role in Q4 this year.

May 16th, 2008