Selling products through comparison shopping sites

Shopping comparison websites are becoming increasingly popular with the price conscious shopper, so we have reviewed 3 of the main competitors in the UK, now that Google is entering the fray with its Froogle search tool.

Kelkoo.co.uk is the current leader in the UK – according to the online measurement company Hitwise, it holds a 17% market share. The next largest contender is
, which has recently rebranded under its new name Shopping.com in the US,
and although it doesn’t own the UK equivalent URL, there is a redirect to a UK
mirror site that includes shopper reviews.

Both of these sites list product information from a range of participating retailers, allowing users to sort and compare products by price and category. To get your products listed in Kelkoo you need to contact them to obtain a quote, whilst Dealtime allows you to sign up online. You also need to set up a data-feed to each of these services with your product information and any images, although this is not as complicated as it sounds!

They both charge for this activity on a pay-per-click basis, which varies depending on the category of product you are offering. From our experience this cost tends to be similar or slightly higher than the PPC advertising offered by Google and Overture, but conversion rates can be better. This is because visits that are received from these sources will be from people who are actively interested in making a purchase, although as you will tend to get many visits from people comparing your cost to your competitors, price is a key issue!

Froogle is a shopping search and price comparison site owned by Google. This tool is currently only available for US shoppers but is due to be launched in a UK version shortly. Advertisers can provide product information for free and results are displayed based on search criteria and product descriptions used. Searchers can sort by price and category or display more products from a selected retailer.

Google has not been particularly active in promoting this tool to date as it remains in a beta format, so it will probably not attract as much traffic as Kelkoo or Dealtime who market their sites through a number of channels and also buy pay-per-click advertising on search engines. However, the launch of Froogle in the UK indicates an extension of this service which may be supported by more advertising to make it a serious tool of first resort for online shoppers!

If you sell products online and would like to know more about using these comparison shopping sites, including adding products to the new Froogle UK search engine, contact us now for more details.

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