Trend Watch: Shopzilla Offers Product-Level Bidding

Shopzilla yesterday announced the launch of its new bidding tool, which enables e-tailers to vary bid amounts by product. Shopzilla's new bidding tool combines search, sort and filter capabilities with granular reporting to allow online merchants to isolate and adjust bids on their products based on their return on investment (ROI).

Shopzilla's new bidding tool is intended to accommodate both simple and sophisticated bidding strategies, according to the company, providing online vendors with much greater flexibility and control over their campaign performance.

Retailers can place the same bid on all products within a subcategory or select products from multiple subcategories and use the tool's features to identify those products for which they want to change bids. This will allow sellers to promote their best performing products and brands, says the company, and to act immediately on inventory changes, special promotions and seasonal products. Using data that is integrated from Shopzilla's Performance Tracker, Web shop owners can analyze and bid in one interface.

Sales volume and conversion-to-sale vary greatly by product, with a relatively small number of products frequently driving a large percentage of online sales, according to Shopzilla. The company's theory is that lack of efficient product level bidding has hurt e-tailers' ROI because they've been limited to placing the same bid on all products despite differences in performance.

"Online retailers have been asking for product level bidding for some time," Bobby Benfield, vice president, Merchant Sales and Operations for Shopzilla, said in a statement. "A key differentiator between the general search and shopping search engines has been that the general search engines have enabled retailers to vary bids on individual keywords that generate the most sales volume, while maintaining lower, undifferentiated bids for products that don't drive as many sales but are still worth advertising.

"With the launch of our new bidding tool, we are now providing retailers with the same degree of control over their campaigns that they've previously had only in the SEM markets. Although we've offered product level bidding via datafeeds for several years, this tool was designed based on market research we conducted with our retailer clients."

The move to offer product-level bidding comes on the heels of an announcement last month by Shopping.com to do the same. Shopping.com merchants had also asked for the ability to better showcase specific products within a category. In response, the site is developing a SKU-level bidding program, in beta in Q4 with select merchants. The company told Ecommerce-Guide that the new option allows Web shop owners to focus bidding on the highest-trafficked products within productized categories. So, for instance, if you want to focus on a particular model of digital camera, you can, rather than have to bid and manage a campaign on the entire category of digital cameras.

For more information on Shopzilla's new offering, e-tailers should contact the Merchant Services team at merchantservices@shopzilla.com.

Michelle Megna is managing editor of ECommerce-Guide.com.

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