What’s The Top Comparison Shopping Engine?

The Comparison Shopping Report – Q1 2012

The new year that seemingly began yesterday is already over a quarter way through.

With ecommerce coming off yet another record breaking quarter, merchants are preparing for things to heat up again as summer comes along–and what better way to prepare than to get the latest in the world of comparison shopping?

Below you’ll find the latest, and 13th overall edition of our Comparison Shopping Report.

Like we did with our rankings each of the past two quarters, we’ve split up the rankings into 4 specific categories (free registration required):

We train our chimps to pull data from our 100+ clients, input the ~4.2MM (million) clicks, $1MM+ in spend and close to $8MM in revenue that the CSE’s drove to them into our hamster-powered computer for analysis, and finally a team of expert Excel-using sloths compiled the charts you’ll see below.

So let’s get started.

Traffic

Amazon is our comparison shopping traffic leader here with Google close behind followed by the other four CSE’s that we consider to be in the top-tier.

This marks the 4th straight quarter that Amazon has topped our rankings in traffic, and it shouldn’t be terribly surprising that the largest ecommerce company (Amazon) and search engine in the world (Google) are also the two that send our merchants the most traffic.

Revenue

While Amazon was our traffic leader for the 4th straight quarter, Google emerges as our revenue leader for the 6th straight quarter, a feat it has claimed since Q4 2010.

Nextag isn’t far behind while Amazon, Shopping.com, Pricegrabber and Shopzilla round out the top 6 spots.

Below the charts are broken into two parts, dark blue represents data from Q1 2012, and light blue reflects data from the previous quarter, Q4 2011.

Conversion Rate % (orders/clicks)

Google is once again in a class of its own, with the results very closely align in terms of ranking to what we saw during the last quarter, with slight drop offs since we’re out of the Q4 shopping season where buyers are the most motivated to purchase compared to any other quarter.

Still the decreases are minimal, with Pricegrabber actually seeing an increase of 0.11%, and Shopzilla edging over last quarter’s results by 0.02%.

COS (Cost divided by Revenue) %

Pricegrabber is our leader here among the paid comparison shopping engines, while Nextag finishes in 2nd again.

The CSE’s here alternate between their performances last quarter, with three out of the 7 actually seeing a decrease in COS %.

Average CPC (Cost-per-click) Rate

Just a quick recap:

Bing Shopping – Free
Google Product Search – Free
The Find – Free
Pricegrabber – 26 cents average CPC
Shopping.com – 32 cents average CPC
Amazon Product Ads – 33 cents average CPC
Shopzilla – 34 cents average CPC
Become – 37 cents average CPC
Pronto – 41 cents average CPC
Nextag – 42 cents average CPC
Being out of Q4 we see a decrease in CPC rates aside from a couple of CSE’s.

Pricegrabber saw the lowest CPC rates, which is due in large part to our ability to bid below rate cards, a very valuable feature for comparison shopping management, and a good alternative to suppressing products.

Responsiveness Rating (ranking from 1-10, 1 being best)

Our account managers here are constantly in touch with the shopping engines in an attempt to optimize our merchants’ accounts, and know first hand which engines are quickest to contact and who acts best.

Merchant Tools (ranking from 1-10, 1 being best)

Conclusion

In the end we ranked each comparison shopping engine from each of our metrics from 1-10 and assigning a point value for each category (higher being better).

We doubled the COS % value making that out of a possible 20 points, and weighted traffic + revenue as 1.5 each for a maximum of 15, summed it up, and got the following:

Google is our leader again but the battle for second was close, as Nextag edges Pricegrabber by a point.

Shopping.com and Amazon round out the top half of the list, with Shopzilla finishing in 6th.

If you want to check out the comparison shopping engines for themselves, take a look at their sites here:

Breaking Down the Rankings by Category

Through special demand by our readers asking us to break down the CSE’s by specific categories, we have created separate studies that concentrate on apparel, electronics, home & garden, and sporting goods.