What’s The Top Comparison Shopping Engine?

The Comparison Shopping Report – Q4 2009

Welcome to the Q4 edition of our quarterly comparison shopping engines. With the shopping season increasing sales across the board, it was a busy quarter for all merchants marketing with comparison shopping.

Again, this comparison shopping report compares the major comparison shopping engines and see how they rank based on the following criteria:

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

In this edition of the comparison shopping report, they ranked as follows:

1.
2.
3.
3.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

Below we’ll quickly sum up the graphs–for more details you can view our previous comparison shopping report for a deeper explanation of each category.

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

Traffic (average clicks per month)

Revenue (average per month)

COS %

Average CPC

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

10.

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:

Engine	Traffic	Revenue	Cos %	Avg. CPC	Responsive- ness	Merchant Tools	Total
Google Base	9	15	20	10	1	10	65
Shopzilla	15	13.5	12	3	7	9	59.5
Nextag	13.5	12	10	1	8	7	51.5
Pricegrabber	12	10.5	8	4	9	8	51.5
Shopping	10.5	9	16	7	3	5	50.5
Cashback	6	7.5	18	9	4	2	46.5
Become	7.5	6	4	8	10	6	41.5
Smarter	1.5	4.5	14	6	6	3	35
Yahoo	4.5	1.5	2	5	5	4	22
Pronto	3	3	6	2	2	1	17

Again Google Base is atop our list, with the Shopzilla in 2nd, and Nextag/Pricegrabber in 3rd place.

With Yahoo Shopping partnering with Pricegrabber it’ll be interesting to see how this affects Pricegrabber’s traffic amount as well as its conversion rates.

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