You are in: ECommerce-Guide > Solutions > Customer Relations

ECommerce-Guide Essentials eBiz FAQ Everything you need to know to start your own successful e-business. Selling on eBay How to make money in the online marketplace. PayPal Payments and More What's new in secure payments for your online store. Shopping Cart Software Solutions to close, process and track your online sales.

Making Your eBay Store Search-Savvy, Part Two
By Beth Cox
July 22, 2004

Continued from Page One.

Shopping.com
Shopping.com is the result of the merger of shopping search engine DealTime and Epinions, a consumer review and ratings operation. They charge online merchants on a cost-per-click basis to list items from their stores.

The rate card showed me that in my category, flowers and plants, the cost would be 25 cents a click. Although there is no setup fee, they do charge $75 for writing the programming code involved for a customized crawler to go over your Web site.

Michele Husak at Shopping.com said eBay store operators "should be able to sign up as a Shopping.com merchant using the eBay feed" by visiting this link to the merchant enrollment page. She could not say how many store operators have signed up to date.

However, a minimum deposit of $200 to your Merchant Account is required to get started. That alone told me that this is not for me, but as we grow, it might be something worth considering.

Standing out might be a problem, though -- there were more than 10,000 items listed in the flower and gifts category.

When I did a search for orchids under $30, I got only 10 results, from major retailers, so it's clear that no eBay items are listed, as many of our products (and those of our eBay competitors) retail for less than $30.

However, I was again pleasantly surprised to see our Web site pop up in the Additional Resources area when I did a search on a few specific types of orchids. And there was a link to an eBay search page for whatever search term I had entered.

The Yahoo! Shopping Effort
The shopping area at Yahoo! also offers search, price comparison and product reviews.

But when I went there, the first thing I saw, along the right side of the page, were ads for Home Depot, Dell, JC Penney, Gap, Eddie Bauer, etc. -- immediately giving me the impression that merchandise from a small retail site like ours would be lost here.

At the bottom of the page I found this: "Want to see your products in Yahoo! Shopping? Build your own online store or Advertise with us."

Well, I already have my own online store, thanks, and when I probed a little deeper, I found this: "inclusion in Yahoo! Product Search and Yahoo! Buyer's Guides is based on a cost-per-click price and varies by product category."

The cost-per-click rate card can be seen here. Pricing starts at 19 cents a click. And some rates in "Flowers" were $1.26 a click -- way out of my league. The FAQ didn't mention eBay feeds at all, and that was enough for me, so I bailed on this one.

Yahoo! recently changed to a new Site Match paid inclusion program that appears to exclude most free listings and has drawn some mild criticism from some of the search marketing experts.

I did note that when I did a search for orchids, a paid link (paid by eBay) popped up letting me do the same search on eBay itself. I also noted that some of my orchid sales competition is paying to be listed here, but I found no links at all to anyone's eBay store.

Conclusions
There are of course, other shopping search sites, including MSN Shopping and AOL Shopping and a lot more, but my conclusion is that this process takes so much time (and some risk, when paying for clicks as opposed to actual sales) that for the average hard-pressed small business on eBay, it's just not worth making much of an effort.

Of course, eBay itself should be making more of an effort, in my opinion. Since they get a cut on everything an eBay store owner sells, it's clearly in their best interest to work deals with shopping sites and to make it far easier for store owners to use that XML feed.

But for now, I'm going to stick with our small Google and Overture keyword ad campaigns, our little keyword campaign that runs on eBay itself, and our new eBay store feed to Froogle.

Meanwhile, drop me an e-mail if you have success getting your store listings in somewhere on the cheap. I'll share your advice with readers in a future story.

Beth Cox is a contributor to eCommerce-Guide.com.

Do you have a comment or question about this article or other e-commerce topics in general? Speak out in the SmallBusinessComputing.com E-Commerce Forum. Join the discussion today!

Tools:

Add ecommerce-guide.com to your favorites Add ecommerce-guide.com to your browser search box IE 7 | Firefox 2.0 | Firefox 1.5.x Receive news via our XML/RSS feed