Welcome to the shopping search and comparison shopping marketing blog. The aim of this blog is to help UK retailers understand the market and make the most of what it has to offer. I hope that we can help you unravel the mysteries that surrounds the myriad of shopping sites that are currently available.
The terms comparison shopping and shopping search are quite far apart in terms of what they stand for. Comparison shopping in essence is investigating who’s the cheapest on the 42″ LCD TV you’ve wanted for the past 2 years. Of course it’s good to see a broad range of prices so you are sure that you are not paying over the odds. All of the comparison sites offer this simple service. The real measure of quality can be defined through shopping search. Shopping search is not results based on part numbers, but on search terms very much like Google. So if I’m searching for a new black pin striped suit I’ll have results that fit this search criteria. Essentially it is this search functionailty that will set apart the men from the boys.
Relevance is the key!! The qulity of your feed is paramount. If I’m searching for my black pin striped suit I would only get results based on these search words. You would be surprised how often merchants don’t have this kind of information in the title or the description. It appears to be a very rudimentary requirement but often this gets over looked. The convention recently has been to ensure that the categorisation of the product is accurate and ignoring the important content. Of course it is important to have the item categorised correctly, however, how many people go onto a shopping search site and go through the layers of categorisation? Not many. People use the search bar more than anything, which means those that don’t have good titles and descriptions will never appear.
SKU / Part Number / EAN / UPC – which one is which???
Along the same lines as the shopping search lines, the unique numbers cause merchants a real headache. So what is the best practice? It must be apprecaited by all merhcants that each site has its own very frustrating idiosyncracys for product alignment. I’m sure all merhcants have encounetered this before to an extent. The simple fact must remain that there must be standarisation within the industry for all comparison engies to use the same number, where that be the the SKU (stock keeping unit) or the EAN (European article number), there must be one unifying code that everyone will use. It can be argued that this already exists, however there is a limit to this compliance. You can have a SKU number of ABC-123, where 5 sites will use this ABC-123 formula and the others will use ABC123. The only real solution for a merhcant will be to send out bespoke feeds for each site which their own specific SKU number requirement.
