Shoptoit.ca Doing Their Part in Click-Fraud Transparency

We’ve discussed aplenty on click fraud being blown out of proportion as it relates to comparison shopping. However a Canadian based shopping engine, Shoptoit.ca is taking a strong stance to eliminate these fears completely.

When a merchant logs into their Shoptoit account and looks through their click reports, Shoptoit makes it completely transparent where the clicks are coming from via the consumer’s IP address.

The screenshot below illustrates how Shoptoit breaks down the source of traffic and whether or not a click is charged for:

The second column above lists the IP address in which the click came from, and in the parenthesis is how many times that IP address clicked through to the particular merchant’s site. A merchant can then see in columns 4 and 5 that only the initial click was charged for, while subsequent clicks were not.

So whether a user clicked through to the merchant’s site three times or a hundred, the merchant will end up paying the same amount.

Other engines implement a similar system in which a high multitude of clicks from one specific source are not charged for–though few make this as clear cut as Shoptoit does.

We applaud their efforts at calming merchants’ fears on the engine, and encourage other engines to try the same–as paranoia can often trump reasoning most days of the week