1. Hire a professional consultant/company for thousands of dollars each month or
2. Figure out a way to do it yourself….somehow…someway.

• Save time and money organizing, configuring and scheduling feeds.
• View Up to the Minute Performance of Your Channels, Storefronts, Categories, and Products with Chanalytics(sm)!
• Send your catalog feed to ANY shopping comparison site or marketplace immediately.
• Adjust catalog feeds and product updates across your marketing channels in minutes, and
• Analyze how your marketing campaigns are performing on a daily basis.

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"MerchantAdvantage is here to be your partner in growing your business in the multi billion dollar and complex world of online shopping. We are here because you are online.^sm"

Michael Lambert, CEO

Four Steps to Improve Your Comparison Shopping Engine (CSE) Marketing
by Brett Bernstein
Many things in life should go un-said. These are the things that common sense will explain. As an example, common sense says do not put your hand in a fire. Pretty logical right?

One of the things I believe is common sense is to practice coherent and strategic selling practices when dealing with Comparison Shopping Engines ("CSEs"). CSEs act as their own form of organic search, but instead of searching for "key words" related to what you sell on your site, CSEs have a captive audience looking for merchandise to buy. In this realm, online merchants must be savvy about how CSEs manage their product catalog to reach the customer. This includes:

1. Test which products do and don't work and why within each CSE channel.

2. Identify the right key words to describe products so that they are listed properly.

3. Make sure your product descriptions are enticing and accurate.

4. Make sure your product photos are clean (when applicable).

We recommend that you don't simply sell blind on CSEs and hope that traffic comes to your storefront. Do not feed your whole catalog and hope your best products get clicked on and bought. Comparison shopping engines are much like your main storefront; they require love, care and trial and error to see what marketing strategies work. Use whatever tools are necessary to assess and accomplish these strategies, but DO NOT expect tools to conceive of, or implement the strategies without your guidance.

If you really want your products to produce revenues for you, in relation to the click costs you are paying CSEs, you must "plan your work" and "work your plan." We recommend doing this by first creating a strategy on how you want to work with a particular CSE while understanding how that CSE can work for you effectively. Most important is to understand what marketing language, product description and image manipulation they allow so that your products get listed where they will be seen most. MerchantAdvantage, in working with its clients, has learned that merchants know their products the best and what performs best using various marketing channels. Several of our merchants ensure that they create the proper marketing/key words associated with products which, in turn, guarantees that products are listed in the proper place when a consumer comes to a CSE looking for that product using their own search criteria.

For example, a customer might come to CSE 1 and type "family under garments" and your products might not appear because you only identified them to be listed as "under garments." Thus, you lose out on an opportunity to display your product. However, on CSE 2 this description worked out well for you. Merchants should track how they got the "click through" using our Chanalytics(sm) tool or another ROI tool, and should adjust marketing efforts accordingly to capture all traffic that comes to a CSE looking for "under garments", "family under garments", or "sexy under garments." This is done by simply associating products listed on the CSE with the appropriate key/marketing words.

Now when a merchant does this across each CSE for a few weeks, they'll have excellent data to show how best to market products within a CSE and change the marketing language with another CSE, which has a customer base which favors different types of search key words.

The Channel Management with Chanalytics(sm) tool allows you to work each channel intelligently and these types of educated business decisions will both save you money and make your clicks back to your site more targeted, relevant for the consumer, and lead to more profits and trust in your brand.

• Developing a Code of Conduct for Comparison Shopping Engines
The Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) got busy early this year. The technology standards division of the National Retail Federation (NRF), ARTS began in 2007 with the introduction of several e-commerce data and content management standards.

Among those standards, ARTS -- in partnership with the NRF's Shop.org division -- introduced a new e-commerce data exchange format for comparison shopping engines (CSE) at the annual Shop.org convention in October 2006. View Full Story>>

• A $100 Client Discount on Internet Retailer 2007 Registration:
As an existing or prospective client of MerchantAdvantage, LLC we are pleased to provide you with an exclusive $100 discount off the current registration fee for the Internet Retailer 2007 Conference & Exhibition, America's largest e-retailing conference.
View Full Story>>

• Standardize It:
A bigger push is developing for industry wide data standards. Currently each company (retailer or engine/marketplace) uses different format requirements for product data. More merchants and industry professionals are working to build a consistent format in which all merchants can easily use the same system.

• Rise in Satisfaction:
Lost in the constant talk about new technology and marketing methods is the startling success of customer satisfaction in online retail. In recent surveys, online retailers actually beat traditional brick-and-mortar stores. In a survey of customers, online retailers averaged a satisfaction index score of 83% compared to 74% for traditional stores during the same period.

• The Quest for Options:
For retailers who are tired of rising cost per click rates (CPC), there is a growing list of companies offering alternatives. Increasingly, comparison engines are being developed to use a cost per acquisition (CPA) or commission based billing strategy. This way a retailer is only billed when a sale occurs. Traditional comparison engines like Shopping.com have offered this new feature as well as newer engines like TheFind.com and JellyFish.com. Traditional marketplaces like Amazon and Shop.com also feature this billing method.

For information on how MerchantAdvantage may help your business grow, please contact us:
Chip Arndt
Executive Vice President
Business Development and Strategy
305.895.9466 x113
partnerships@merchantadvantage.com

Merchantadvantage.com is an ecommerce software solutions company committed to championing and helping the small to midsized online ecommerce Merchant address complicated online issues and take a systematic, controlled and proactive approach to online product marketing. MerchantAdvantage provides long-term, cost effective software tools that enable an online business to grow by reaching the widest audience possible via online, broadband, and wireless devices. MerchantAdvantage's applications are designed to thoroughly connect the online retailer to their marketplace partners in a seamless motion of communication allowing Merchants to take control of their ecommerce channels, marketing strategies, IT solutions, and online order management demands. These software tools specifically help ecommerce retailers bridge the gap created by non-standardized data feeds to various online market places, shopping comparison sites, and other online shopping destination sites. MerchantAdvantage is changing the macrocosm of ecommerce by staying ahead of the curve in providing business solutions to the growing online retail marketplace: We're here because America's commerce future is online.™
MerchantAdvantage, the premier software for on-line retailers looking for an efficient and effective method of online product marketing, order and customer service handling, introduces Channel Management with Chanalytics(sm). Channel Management helps online retailers save time and money while maximizing their return on investment and marketing budgets by allowing them to easily connect with shopping comparison sites. MerchantAdvantage is for online retailers wishing to better manage their online marketing efforts and increase their sales volume.