What’s The Top Comparison Shopping Engine?

The Comparison Shopping Report – Q2 2010

The purpose of The Comparison Shopping Report is to compare the major comparison shopping engines and see how they rank.

Since we started these reports over a year ago, the comparison shopping space has remained largely the same aside from three notable exceptions:

1. Yahoo! Shopping portal’s decision to cease operating as an independent engine on March 11. Their shopping results are now powered by Pricegrabber.

2. Amazon’s huge leap in its quest to be not only the web’s #1 retail destination but to make its Product Ads platform a top-tier comparison shopping engine as well.

3. Microsoft’s comparison shopping solution as we currently know it will cease to exist though we’re eagerly waiting to see how Bing Cashback will come back.

Now onto this quarter’s report.

For a more in-depth look at our methodology please take a look at our original comparison shopping report which provides further details into the sections below.

Here’s the criteria we use to compile our comparison shopping report:

overall traffic driven
average amount of revenue generated
conversion rate (NEW)
COS (Cost of Sale) % or return on spend
average CPC (cost-per-click) rates
responsiveness rate among the engines
quality of merchant tools

For the first two categories, the results are based on an index of 100, with the rest expressed as a percentage of the leader.

Traffic

Combining the forces of its own network along with the Yahoo! Shopping userbase, Pricegrabber takes the early lead here, although the next three comparison shopping sites are very closely behind.

Revenue

Proving that free traffic can also be highly qualified, Google Product Search was by far the biggest revenue driver for our merchants, followed by Nextag, and then surprisingly by Amazon Product Ads, which was only the 6th biggest traffic driver as seen above.

Conversion Rate % (orders/clicks)

New to this edition’s rankings–conversion rate essentially calculates how qualified a certain engine’s traffic is by calculating what percentage of click-throughs end up being purchases.

In this instance Amazon leads the pack followed closely by Bing Cashback and Google Product search.

COS (Cost divided by Revenue) %

Google / Cashback are #1 / #2 here. Amazon holds the top spot among the CPC engines by a substantial amount.

Average CPC (Cost-per-click) Rate

While highly qualified, Amazon clicks don’t come cheap, as once again it ranks highest in this category as well, though on what is invariably the wrong side of the chart.

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

10.

Have a question about comparison shopping or want to get in contact with the engines about an issue? Certainly we do all the time, and here’s how our account management team ranked each engine’s overall responsiveness.

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

10.

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 Shopping finishes at the top of our comparison shopping report, followed by the other top-tier engines, with Cashback close behind and Amazon making its first appearance right below them.

Once again, Google finished at the top, and the rest finished as follows:

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