Shopping.com Appends Apparel Listings

One of the main methods of keeping overall costs low on the shopping engines (while facing minimal sacrifices in revenue) is to ensure that clicks that go through to your site remain as relevant as possible.

In order to achieve this, detailed product titles and descriptions that describe exactly what it is a merchant is selling are important; compared to broad, generic phrases that will list your product on search result pages via phrases that are irrelevant to your products–thereby driving unqualified traffic to your site resulting in higher costs.

One way that Shopping.com is trying to combat this is by introducing more columns to their feed that a merchant can use in order to better target their audiences.

In anticipation of the 2008 holiday season, Shopping.com is redesigning how we display all shoes on our main site with a focus on improving product presentation, description and conversion to sale.

Through the use of user testing groups of real shoppers, we have identified FOUR key attributes in the shoes and clothing categories which help shoppers make decisions more quickly:

•    Gender
•    Type
•    Color
•    Size

Though these attributes won’t be required in your data feed, you can be sure that your competition is going to fully utilize these, thereby giving them an advantage in that space.

How to use these new attributes

For certain merchants these fields may be easy to fill depending on how many SKUs they have or how their feed exporting system is set up.

On the other hand for larger merchants who don’t have the tools to utilize these new attributes, there’s no need to panic as this is essentially a bonus feature for merchants with the capabilities to do so, and you’ll unlikely experience much drop off in traffic or sales as a result.

In fact, with Q4 coming up, most merchants should anticipate a spike in both traffic and revenue, as more and more shoppers are going to want to experience the season of giving from the comfort of their homes rather than head to the battlefields we refer to as the mall.

Plus, with the economy being in worse shape than we’ve seen in some years pass, shoppers are going to be more motivated to find lower prices online via the comparison shopping engines, making the planning of next few months vitally important to your company (we’ll explore what Q4 means and how to take advantage in a later blog post).

As such, you might want to consider outsourcing your shopping engine management to companies that will help maximize your revenue and efficiency.

Just a suggestion 🙂