Customers: Just as investing in SEO and SEA are great ways to increase your online reach, we believe that comparison shopping engines (CSEs) can be equally effective in driving visitors to your online store. By enabling people to compare prices online, CSEs play a crucial role in a customer’s purchasing process. If your online store isn’t on these CSEs, you’re missing out. Find out what you can do to change that.
What Is a CSE?
Whether someone is interested in buying a new SLR camera or a new romantic novel, CSEs are a great guide to help customers choose their desired product at the lowest total price (including shipping costs). To help customers make this choice, CSEs often rank vendors based on customer reviews.
What are the top five CSEs?
To give you an example of what a CSE is and looks like, we have listed SmartMoney’s top picks based on popularity and performance:
Benefits For Retailers
CSEs don’t just create convenient opportunities for consumers, they offer new possibilities for retailers too. They help you increase your sales and offer more visibility in terms of search engine presence. In turn, this allows you to reach the type of customers who know what they want and are ready to buy it.
So What Is It Going to Cost Me?
There are a couple of free CSEs such as Google Shopping and Bing Shopping, but most include a cost-per-click fee. This means that you pay a fixed cost when a visitor clicks on your product. Aside from the cost-per-click method, other CSEs charge a pay-per-sale fee. Simply put, you pay the CSE a percentage of your product’s sales price.
How Do I Get My Products Listed?
So you know what CSEs are, why it’s important to have your products listed on them, and how much that’s going to cost you, but how do you get your products listed? Submitting your product listings is easier than you think. Many CSEs offer easy-to-use product listing tools that allow you to submit your formatted product feed. The CSE uses this feed to display the included information on results pages when shoppers look for your products. The product feed must meet the CSE’s criteria and should be kept up to date. This ensures that search results will display your products with their latest prices and information.
That’s our take on this topic. Have a look at the top CSEs we mentioned earlier and make sure that when people search for a product, your business is on there too.
