After a turbulent year, retailers are dusting themselves off and learning to adapt to the changes made to shopping feeds in the last 12 months. While comparison shopping sites may seem daunting to some, there is no doubt these are still an important resource for brand awareness and customer acquisition. This is not to say that selling across multiple shopping comparison sites is a simple process. Each of the hundreds of comparison shopping engines has unique data requirements. Pairing this with the complexities of managing variable inventory levels and pricing promotions, it is often difficult to be seen on comparison shopping sites. One of the top errors a retailer can make is to manage its shopping feeds in the same way as its PPC campaigns. Comparison shopping and paid search are both similar in that they are advertising channels used to drive traffic to your website via a PPC or a cost-per-click (CPC) model, but thats generally where the similarities end. With comparison shopping, consumers are given product images, product descriptions, pricing and information about retailers who sell these products. Consumers also have the ability to sort these listings in multiple ways. Ensuring this data can be effectively distributed to all shopping feeds is what sets you apart from the competition.
ChannelAdvisors Comparison Shopping Solution
ChannelAdvisors Comparison Shopping solution optimizes and manages online retailers comparison shopping efforts, giving you the power and flexibility to be competitive on this channel. It allows you to scale your business without adding costly resources or sacrificing ROI targets. This single interface enables you to plug into the sales opportunities on dozens of shopping feed sites and ensure the best return on investment.
Effectively List Shopping Feeds Across Multiple Shopping Comparison Sites
Negotiating your data around the individual nuances for every comparison engine can become a resource strain for many businesses. Considering how often feeds need to be sent and the changing requirements and fees of various shopping engines, managing a comparison shopping strategy can be intimidating. The shopping feed solution enables you to simplify listing and reporting on multiple engines. You only need to upload your inventory once to the ChannelAdvisor solution; from there your data will be optimized to drive visibility and sales. Labels will be assigned to your inventory once its uploaded. Labels are a dynamic way of grouping inventory efficiently and are used to distribute inventory to multiple shopping engines. You will also have the option to create your own custom labels that can be used to assign one group of products to one shopping site while assigning a different group of products to an alternate shopping site.
Efficiently Manage Feeds from One Platform
The Comparison Shopping solution has many sophisticated tools that make managing feeds an easy process:
Business Rules:
Define business rules that automatically translate data elements into actions that improve relevancy, value proposition and traffic quality across every shopping feed. These rules offer flexibility in converting and manipulating your data to achieve the best results. You can also assign specific margin targets for each product and manage your campaigns accordingly.
Product Filtering:
Filter products from your data feed based on price, brand, category or any field in your feed. This tool is a useful way to customize which products are sent to each shopping site, especially since performance for your products will vary widely between the engines. This is also an easy way to remove products on a larger scale from your campaigns.
Lookup Lists:
Lookup Lists are very flexible and powerful options to customize your feeds from one place. They can perform several functions such as: allowing you to get additional data, replace existing data or build a list of products to exclude from feeds.
Unparalleled Visibility into Performance
With an industry as dynamic as e-commerce, its important to view progress and analyze performance. Often, after dedicating time to sending feeds to each shopping comparison site, retailers are left in the dark on productperformance. ChannelAdvisor has trending charts that allow you to compareshopping engine versus shopping engine performance or compare success metric versus success metric. With ChannelAdvisors reporting, youll gain clearer insight into consumer behavior by tracing buyers interactions with your product listings and ads and their search paths across channels. Retailers can a take 360 look at performance across every engine from one dashboard in the ChannelAdvisor solution. Insight into aspects such as performance, conversions, which clicks influenced a sale, latency, feed history and intraday performance give our retailers the competitive edge. This complete view of your data feeds allows you to see your campaigns from all angles, so you can take the appropriate actions to reduce costs and increase profits.