7 Free & Paid Comparison Shopping Engines to improve your store’s sales

  Comparison Shopping Engines offer a great opportunity for e-commerce merchants to boost their store's sales, attract new customers and beat the competition. Research shows that more than half of customers use CSEs to find affordable prices for their products and services and 60% to 70% buyers make a use of comparison shopping engines on regular basis for online shopping.

If your competitors are too smart and you don't take measures to compete, they may divert your potential buyers with best prices to generate more traffic and sales. Comparison shopping engines play a prominent role in e-commerce marketing strategy. It makes your site visible in thousands of comparison websites to boost up your sales and to attract customers.

Merchants can use this data to fine-tune their marketing budget and to increase product exposure on the CSEs, where buyers visit more frequently to explore better prices on products. CSE displays product information, price including shipping amount and comparison price on a single page in response to a buyer's query.

There are several CSEs on the web which is often difficult for a merchant to adopt. According to US market research, there are five CSEs that occupy 80% to 85% of market. This includes,

• Google (Product Listing Ads, PLA)
• Pricegrabber
• NextTag
• Shopping.com
• Amazon Product Ads

Merchants have to spend some amount to be featured at the popular comparison sites and there are few comparison websites who do not charge for registration fee. You need to follow three steps to begin with price comparison site:

• Register and Get access to the advertiser’s account
• Upload product feed of the store to the system
• Run a campaign

Free comparison websites include,

1. DealOz.com

DealOz.com was launched in the year 1991 to help e-commerce merchants for boosting up their store's sales. It is estimated that, about one to two million users visit the site per month and most of the traffic has been generated from U.S. No need to create a separate feed, DealOz accepts all kind of formats for uploading the products. Fields such as sku, name, description, site_category, price, product_url are mandatory to upload a product feed.

 If you upload the products for the first time, it hardly takes 1-3 days to review and later upload happens almost instantly. Look at the below screen shot to understand well about the DealOz features.

2. TheFind

TheFind is one more website that offers free services for merchants. It was launched in the year 2006 and around 9-12 million buyers visit the site per month. Usually, 50% to 60% traffic comes from U.S and most of the traffic is generated from Google organic search.

TheFind is considered as a mobile application and around 300,000-700,000 downloaded this mobile app from Google play and Apple store. It accepts Google product listing Ads only. Hence, to begin with TheFind comparison website, you need to upload products in Google PLA

3. PriceRunner

PriceRunner offer best services for merchants who want to target European and UK visitors and it was launched in the year 1999. In order to work with the PriceRunner comparison site, your company has to be registered in UK or EU. It has unique feed format and some of the fields are similar to Google PLA. The site gets 70% To 80% of traffic from UK.
Paid comparison websites include,

4. Google Product Listing Ads

Google Product Listing is the popular comparison site; majority of traffic for comparison sites comes from it. It has been comprised into two formats.

Format I

Format II

It generates more traffic from U.S and Google PLA make a use of its own and unique product feed in a standard way.

5. Pricegrabber

Pricegrabber mobile application is more popular and price varies depending on category. For a book category, price varies from $0.35, whereas for electronics category price varies from $0.65-$1. Moreover, it has unique product feed format to upload the products and it supports txt and cvs formats.

6. Nextag

Nextag is one of the most popular price comparison websites which was founded in the year 1999. It is estimated that, more than 30 millions of users visit the site monthly to purchase products at best price.
Recently, its organic traffic has been reduced just like pricegrabber. Nextag gets 75% of traffic from U.S and small percent of traffic from other countries such as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain. It has own feed format to upload the products.

7. Shopping.com

eBay bought Shopping.com in the year 2005 and generates equal amount of traffic as Pricegrabber. Prices are adjustable depending on category and season. It has unique feed format and products data can be uploaded in csv and xml files. Around 20-25 millions of buyers visit the site monthly.

Summary

Recently, many comparison search engines lost their organic traffic but still merchants has to make a use of it to gain popularity and traffic on the web. E-commerce merchants can get free traffic from free CSEs especially if they set up automatic export option for product feed to get updated automatically.

How to Leverage Your Content to Build Links Without Gaming Google

  Over the last few years, Google has made a lot of changes to its algorithms in order to filter spam websites. Recently, link building strategies has changed a lot and it's going to change in forthcoming years. Few years ago, it is slightly possible to build unnatural links for your website to get quick results but now it has been changed completely.

Google has been rolled out several new factors to its algorithm and it is going to design sophisticated algorithms to fine-tune search results in order to penalize spam websites. Google promotes high quality websites that provide accurate results and work well for user's requirement.

Real Link Building

Engage with your current and target audience to expand your market via social media channels in order to achieve popularity among marketing field. This tactic will ultimately lead to a true professional in your niche.
Website owners posted a query in Google official blog stating that, "how do our content get seen in search results when larger brands dominate the SERPs?" This is a tricky question and even Google struggles to answer for this post. Small business owners had put a lot of effort in order to share their content on web and they felt that, unnatural link building strategy is the only way to get their content seen on website and generate inbound links.

In order to gain better results on web, involve in marketing plan which includes paid advertisements and content curation. This ultimately enables you to gain traffic, inbound links naturally without gaming Google.

Start with Good Content

Most of business owners are familiar in developing a content but they are failing to create a great content that helps a customer to solve his/her problem. Make a proper plan, before working on content marketing strategy. Design a structured flow which gives you an outline of the content to engage with target audience. You get more traffic for your website if you communicate with relevant audience.

Content curators like Inbound.org enable you to place a link (no-follow link) to your content in order to drive more traffic for free. Users will share good content through social media channels, links and blog posts, if they think it is more helpful.


Small business owners have to work smart to get ahead. Don't rely on old tactics to get quick results instead of that, work on content strategy to produce relevant content for target audience.