PriceGrabber has powered Yahoo Shopping for awhile now, but Yahoo’s recommended searches are now updating as you type into the search bar (similar to how Google Instant works).

Until now, Yahoo hasn’t coupled their recommended searches with product listings. So now as you type you not only see recommended searches, you see 3 product listings to go along with each recommended search (if they’re available). It’s like Yahoo’s version of Google one-box that updates instantly.

Presumably, PriceGrabber bidding influences whether or not a merchant is displayed in the recommended search results.

Our CSE counterpart in France, Nicolas Leroy, recently wrote a great post which analyzes Pricegrabber’s new design. Personally we’re fans, but what do you think about Pricegrabbers new design?

2010 was an eventful year for eCommerce. So many topics were discussed – mobile commerce, social media, and Amazon made headlines. Image technology, video recommendations, and website personalization were center stage as well.

But take a moment to focus on comparison shopping in the list below, and boost your comparison shopping engine (CSE) revenue in 2011.

1. CPC Strategy’s Merchant Comparison Shopping Handbook

The 1st complete guide for beginners and experts on management and optimization of comparison shopping campaigns.

2. Google Product Search Updates Shopping

Keep up to date with the latest from Google’s shopping portal.

3. Comparison Shopping Holiday Olympics

See who took home the gold in this year’s Olympics.

4. Top 10 Comparison Shopping Engine Rankings – Q3 2010

Google Product Search and Nextag took home awards for the best free and paid CSE’s respectively.

5. Merchant Best Practices with Bing Shopping – Part II

Implement these tips to maximize your traffic.

6. Comparison Shopping Engine Spotlight: Amazon Product Ads

Get the 411 on optimizing your Product Ads.

7. Bing Shopping Releases Merchant Self Service Portal

Migrate to the new portal connected to Microsoft’s adCenter by January 31st.

8. Comparison Shopping Engine Spotlight: Pricegrabber

Optimize your listings on one of the largest paid CSE’s.

9. What is Data Feed Quality?

We revisit the foundation to successful comparison shopping campaigns.

10. Feedback Equals Feed Success

Google Product Search now includes seller reviews.

Each month CPC Strategy releases a merchant comparison shopping spotlight. This month we highlight how you can increase revenue and qualified traffic from PriceGrabber.

Increase Buyer Confidence and Increase Revenue with PriceGrabber Reviews

Merchant reviews are pivotal in today’s shopping world. If you’re a small to medium sized merchant, customer reviews can make or break your performance on an engine. If you’re a large merchant, good customer  reviews can amplify your profits by the tens of thousands on PriceGrabber alone, while bad reviews can stifle your revenue and damage ROI.

“PriceGrabber prominently shows the retailer reviews on every product page and retailers without any reviews are at great a disservice.” Said Graham Jones, Vice President at Pricegrabber. “With the majority of online shoppers looking for a retailer validation before making a purchase, a few positive reviews will go a long way to increase a retailer’s conversion rate.”

Merchant reviews directly correlate to your revenue. On top of that, shoppers that write positive reviews increase the value of their conversion, because they’re more likely to come back for more.

PriceGrabber Bidding

PriceGrabber’s new bidding tool is the most versatile in the comparison shopping industry. Master it to stretch your sales during the Holidays.

“PriceGrabber offers a comprehensive bidding tool that allows retailers to bid on individual products, as well as set bidding rules by: price, category or manufacturer.” Said Graham Jones, Vice President, PriceGrabber. “Our bidding tool helps retailers better optimize clicks and traffic.  As a result, retailers are able to list more products and manage costs more effectively.”

One unique feature with PriceGrabber’s bidding tool is that you can bid below the minimum and above 0. Other shopping engines let you bid 0, but not anywhere in between the minimum CPC and 0. PriceGrabber lets the merchant control their traffic rates with great detail.

Activate your bidding tool

Activate your bidding tool by e-mailing your PriceGrabber account manager. Your account manager’s e-mail is visible in the Click-Thru Summary tab under Reports & Stats on the lower right hand side of the screen.

Lower your costs

Certain product, brand, or category ROI may struggle in your campaign, especially with the recent Holiday CPC rate increase. Lower their traffic levels by decreasing bids by .05 to .10 cents. Test the before and after conversions and traffic levels to make sure your change is sustainable.

Increase your revenue

Increase your revenue from products that convert at a high rate and have a low cost of sale by increasing the relative bid amount by .01 to .10 cents. Test revenue data before and after a bid increase to measure its effectiveness, and remember  that one week of data is usually too small of a sample size to get a good read on the positive or negative effect of a bid.

Add Coupons, Dominate Sales

Shoppers are already looking for early deals this Holiday season. It’s a rush to savings. Tip the scale in your favor by adding a coupon on PriceGrabber.

“Adding coupons through the retailer feed is extremely effective for retailers trying to generate increased sales volume.  Additionally, product level promotions are very helpful for retailers trying to gain a competitive edge on product listings where each retailer is offering MAP pricing or listings that have retailers in a constant “price war.” – Graham Jones, Vice President, PriceGrabber.

The best part about coupons on PriceGrabber is that they’re free on product pages and they’re easy to add. We wrote a post all about it here.

Here’s a breakdown of the increases to date:

Shopzilla Holiday rate card

Gifts.com Holiday rate card

What we like:

NexTag’s 25% rate increase announcement was a first page pop-up in the merchant login.

Shopzilla e-mailed their rate increase announcement to merchants during peak hours and applied different % increases depending on a product’s category.

Clicking through to the link takes one to Fedex’s site, where a merchant is presented a chart comparing standard shipping rates vs savings rates, ranging from 20-26% depending on the service.

It’s a very natural pairing of course, combining retailers with a shipping company, but do merchants really want to be pitched within their logins, as un-intrusive as the ad may be?

One must wonder then, is Pricegrabber is charging a CPA or CPC model for this kind of brand promoting?

Starting June 3 Yahoo! Shopping announced that their merchants can list both PriceGrabber and Yahoo! Shopping reviews on Yahoo! Shopping accounts.

This gives merchants the opportunity to strengthen their product listings with a combination of PriceGrabber surveys and Yahoo! Shopping surveys. Great job Yahoo!

“On June 3, the Yahoo! Store team will add a new field to the ratings page in Store Manager to enable syndication of your [PriceGrabber] transactional ratings to Yahoo! Shopping. This field will allow participating merchants to enter and submit their PriceGrabber Retailer ID in order to syndicate their store transactional ratings to Yahoo! Shopping via their PriceGrabber account.”

Your PriceGrabber Retailer ID can be found in three places:

• In your PriceGrabber merchant survey code
• In your PriceGrabber CTS code (sales tracker code)
• By asking your PriceGrabber account representative

To reiterate, starting June 3 the ratings page in the Yahoo Shopping Store Manager will have a field that allows the syndication of PriceGrabber and Yahoo Shopping store reviews. To syndicate enter your PriceGrabber Retailer ID and that should be it.

If you have trouble finding your PriceGrabber Retailer ID feel free to e-mail me at Andrew@cpcstrategy.com and I’ll be happy to help you find it.

There are two main factors that a merchant should be concerned about regarding the switch: traffic and conversion.

We initially theorized that merchants on Pricegrabber will see an increase in traffic (by way of Yahoo Shopping users), accompanied by a drop in conversion rates since historically we’ve seen that Yahoo Shopping traffic doesn’t convert nearly as well as some of the other major engines, such as Pricegrabber.

In practice though?

That’s what we sought to find out.

The Study

Our goal was to analyze some of our clients’ campaign data since the change took place (March 11th), and compared it to the same period prior to the change.

We also compared the same merchants to their campaigns on another major shopping engine, Nextag, in order to normalize the data and remove any seasonal bias of that particular merchant.

Traffic Change

Below is a chart of eight merchants from various industries detailing the % change from when the change was made (March 11 to March 30) compared to the 20 days prior (Feb 19 – March 10):

We can observe two things from this chart:

a) While some merchants saw relatively a flat increase/decrease in traffic on Nextag, some of those saw a very dramatic rise on Pricegrabber, which can be attributed in large part to being listed on Yahoo.

b) For merchants that experienced significant drops on both engines (due to seasonality) of their products, the drop on Pricegrabber was less significant than on Nextag, which again may be Yahoo Shopping consumers mitigating the drop off for Pricegrabber.

Conversion Change

The other important factor that a merchant should be concerned with as we mentioned above is conversion, or cost of sale % (cost/revenue).

The chart below represents a merchant’s change in COS, so if in the period prior to the change they had a 20% COS, then post-change they got 16%, they would be noted as having a change of -4%:

The results here are less conclusive than the ones above. There are both cases of the Nextag merchants seeing a greater decrease in COS %, as well as vice versa.

Overall though Nextag merchants saw a greater decrease in COS, and even seeing drops when the same Pricegrabber merchant saw an increase.

Conclusion

We should always be careful to make any gross conclusions from analyzing traffic/conversion data from the CSE’s, as there are many factors to consider that could influence the results.

Still, given the short amount of time since Yahoo Shopping results was taken over with Pricegrabber’s, we observed that merchants seeing drops in traffic on other mediums (Nextag) that the drop was less dramatic on PG, and those who saw an increase on Nextag saw an exaggerated increase on PG.

Conversion rates were less clear, as we saw both improvements and declines from Pricegrabber as compared to Nextag in the same time period.

We will continue to monitor traffic on Pricegrabber as well as conversions to see the impact that Yahoo traffic is having on Pricegrabber.

Today is the big day!

All Yahoo Shopping product results will now be powered by PriceGrabber. If you’re still in the dark about the partnership, you can get caught up by reading Yahoo’s official announcement.

If you did not register with PriceGrabber before Jan. 19, your products are not guaranteed to show up on Yahoo Shopping today. If you still haven’t registered on PriceGrabber, you can sign-up here.

If you have any questions about the transition, make sure to check out the Yahoo! help FAQ page.

It should be interesting to see what impact the partnership will have on traffic & conversion rates for our clients and we will continue to update the blog over the next few weeks to let you know what we’re seeing.

Here is the link to the PriceGrabber merchant registration page – https://partner.pricegrabber.com/.

The minimum initial deposit is $50 and Yahoo merchants can use their xml export to meet PriceGrabber’s technical requirements.

You CAN still sign up for PriceGrabber after today, but they will not guarantee that your products will be live on both PriceGrabber and Yahoo Shopping on March 11th.