CPC Strategy did a study based on the (1) overall traffic driven, (2) conversion rate, (3) Cost of Sale (COS) or Marketing $, (4) CPC Rate, (5) Responsiveness, and (6) Merchant tools; and ranked top 10 major comparison shopping engines (CSEs). The data came from 1Q 2009 and from its client base in non-tech industries.

There are more than a dozen shopping comparison engines that a merchant can use to list products for sale. Listing products on CSEs that operate on the Cost-Per-Click model is a bit risky if the conversion rate is not monitored, as improperly generated feed files could result in wasting a lot of money on advertising products that do not convert. Traffic and conversion analysis is the key to optimizing data feed files for comparison shopping engines. While researching for data feed optimization, I came across an interesting report from Channel Advisor on "average" conversion rates for each CSE by industry. If your CSE result falls below the average shown below, your feed file needs optimization.

Nextag is one of the leading shopping comparison engines (CSE) existed since 1999. It offers a true price comparison by providing an overall price comparison including shipping and tax based on the shopper's geographic location. According to Channel Advisor, Nextag held an 18.2% market share in June 2010 in the shopping comparison market with over 17 million visitors each month. Research also shows as many as 45% of all shoppers use shopping comparison engines to find the best price before committing to purchase a product.

With the Christmas shopping season just around the corner, we've examined become.com's performance. become.com is a new shopping portal we've just added to our marketing campaign so we are required to look at its performance. In September 2010, we received 1018 clicks from Become and had only 2 sales, resulting in about 0.2% conversion rate which is an extremely low conversion rate. We've contacted the become.com and received a free consultation from them on how we can improve our conversion. Here is the summary of the conference call.

Comparison shopping engines are the primary advertisement platform for all e-commerce stores. Learn how to place advertisements with comparison shopping engines.

One of the best ways to bring traffic to your e-commerce website is to add your website to the shopping comparison engines (CSE). CSEs index your product data and present them to Internet shoppers for price comparison. Online users browsing CSEs are generally in the market to purchase merchandise, traffic brought to you by CSEs is targeted traffic you may convert to "real" customers. There are more than a dozen CSEs, some FREE and most PAID engines, which will help you increase your sales volume.