Yahoo Shopping Starting to Revamp Itself

One of the red headed stepchildren of the comparison shopping industry, Yahoo Shopping is revamping their site in an effort to join the others as a legitimate player in the field according to InternetRetailer.com.

One of the main changes they’re making is adding the ability for merchants to make bids to keywords to improve their product placement/rankings on search results, which, as we’ve noted has little relevancy on the other engines and may in fact hurt your overall ROI.

The other main change is increasing their product categories from 64 to over 1,200, which will allow merchants the ability better target their products, but also create a headache when they have to categorize their products in their feeds.

Hopefully our categorization tips can come in handy if/when you need to do this.

We’ll see how these changes affect our clients on Yahoo and their overall ROI, but it certainly is step in the right direction so far.

If we could offer them one bit of advice in regards to their shopping channel though, if anyone over there happens to be listening, it would be to offer merchants the ability to track sales made by customers who come to the merchant sites through the engine.

The only way to currently handle this is through 3rd party analytics, but we would love for Yahoo to actually keep track of money going into merchants–rather than just the costs going to them.

Just a thought.
-Tien