The Top Ten Comparison Shopping Engines Compared – Q2 2010

Did you know?

There’s a more recent Top Ten CSE Rankings you might be interested in! Click here to see what’s changed!

The purpose of the study is to compare the major comparison shopping engines and see how they rank.

Since we started these rankings over a year ago, the CSE space has remained largely the same aside from three notable exceptions:

1. Yahoo Shopping portal’s decision to cease operating as an independent engine on March 11. Their shopping results are now powered by Pricegrabber.

2. Amazon’s huge leap in its quest to be not only the web’s #1 retail destination but to make its Product Ads platform a top-tier comparison shopping engine as well.

3. Microsoft’s comparison shopping solution as we currently know it will cease to exist though we’re eagerly waiting to see how Bing Cashback will come back.

Now onto this quarter’s rankings.

For a more in-depth look at our methodology please take a look at our original rankings which provide further details into the sections below.

Here’s the criteria we use to rank the CSE’s:

• overall traffic driven
• average amount of revenue generated
• conversion rate (NEW)
• COS (Cost of Sale) % or return on spend
• average CPC (cost-per-click) rates
• responsiveness rate among the engines
• quality of merchant tools

For the first two categories, the results are based on an index of 100, with the rest expressed as a percentage of the leader.

Combining the forces of its own network along with the Yahoo Shopping userbase, Pricegrabber takes the early lead here, although the next three engines are very closely behind.

Proving that free traffic can also be highly qualified, Google Product Search was by far the biggest revenue driver for our merchants, followed by Nextag, and then surprisingly by Amazon Product Ads, which was only the 6th biggest traffic driver as seen above.

Conversion Rate % (orders/clicks)

New to this edition’s rankings–conversion rate essentially calculates how qualified a certain engine’s traffic is by calculating what percentage of click-throughs end up being purchases.

In this instance Amazon leads the pack followed closely by Bing Cashback and Google Product search.

Google / Cashback are #1 / #2 here. Amazon holds the top spot among the CPC engines by a substantial amount.

Average CPC (Cost-per-click) Rate

While highly qualified, Amazon clicks don’t come cheap, as once again it ranks highest in this category as well, though on what is invariably the wrong side of the chart.

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Have a question for the engines or want to get in contact with them about an issue? Certainly we do all the time, and here’s how our account management team ranked each engine’s overall responsiveness.

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