Online Channels to Market

Research by Nielsen has found that when consumers go looking for products 79 percent search in the major search engines and price comparison engines first. So you vastly improve the opportunity of being found if you list in multiple portals.

Importantly, the shopping comparison sites are far more likely to rank highly in a search due to the nature of what they do and how they market.

Today the method of shopping research has changed dramatically. No longer will consumers walk from store to store and talk to the sales representatives. This is not to say consumers won’t go to the physical mall or store but by the time they do the decision to buy has often been made. Online shopping comparison allows consumers to search a greater range of providers across a greater geographical area. It can also happen any time of the day. Modern business trends put more pressure on the available time for personal activities and as a result consumers use any means to get back some of that time. Many consumers also throw out their telephone books and use the internet as a fast and convenient method of locating goods, services and their providers.

Owners of physical stores often miss the point of a e-store. More often consumers will use online search and may not come to the store, but then again they may. If you have an online presence that is a sales window to your physical store, you open a new channel and new opportunities.

So do you need to list all your products on these marketplaces? In general the key comparison engines provide a very easy mechanism to provide product feed from your website. There are some organisations that use crawlers or spiders, there are automated systems that search your site and build up a product feed. Mostly the crawlers work but there are some that cause major problems by blocking your website to other visitors. Your hosting company may block these automated systems completely. If you are in doubt you should ask your hosting provider before signing up to such a program.

Shopping portals (marketplaces) and comparison engines have different costs associated with them. Some will charge a fee for each product listed, some charge a cost-per-click while others might charge a commission on the sale of your product. You need to look at the terms and conditions closely so that you are not locked in, and track the results using a good web analytics system like etracker (www.etracker.com) or, at the free end, Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics/).