Forum Moderators: buckworks
1) SHOPPING.com survay appears no matter what, even if the customer wasnt from shopping.com. It is importaint, because it is linked to epinos, which a lot of people know about, andyou can show your rating on your site even with just a few reviews
2) Nextag is good becuase it only shows up if the person came from nextag
3)BIZRATE isnt worth it unless you spend a ton of money. In order to ever see your reviews, (as well as show them) you need 20 or 30 in a 90 day period. I sent a feed of my top selling products to BIZRATE, and $1,000 later got like 4 sales, (.5% CONVERSION) and of that 2 reviews. It may also appear even if someone doesnt come from bizrate, unless you get someone from bizrate to change a setting. isnt worth it if you ask me
I use shopping.com as a default, and for nextag customers only i use nextags review thing. problem is all portals cost too much to get a sale, so if your on a budget then theyre all pretty muh pointless because you will have too few reviews for it to be viable
BTW do you loose a lot of money or make a lot of money with theese portals, and if it works, how do you make it work?
Thanks for your info, especially on nextag. I will install nextag survey code first because the code can determine the traffic based on your introduction. For shopping.com, I probably have to add special tag on the incoming traffic and make the page show the survey code dynamicly and accordingly.
You are absolutely right, shopping portals eat a lot of money, and it is not a good way to invest. Actually, I don't depend traffics from shopping portals too much. Customers referred by portals are very price sensitive, and they won't spend more on your site after they keep clicking to find the best price (which waste you tons of PPC). The only reason I use shopping portals is I make use of many repeated postings and reviews of my products in the shopping portal network to enhance my natural search ranking and credibility.
So far, I mainly use bizrate to maintain my store ratings there. Between shopping.com and bizrate, I think bizrate's store review system is more popular and consequently it is important for google/yahoo/msn/froogle to evaluate your site. Moreover, a good ratings will encourage customers from natural search to buy more and boost your sales.
I use nextag by monthly budget, its ROI is not good as bizrate. Also, it is not as important as bizrate/shopping.com from a view point of SEO.
I just used Shopping.com for a couple of days, it eats me a lot of money. But I might have to pay to keep the posting, because its network is even bigger than bizrate and will help me improve search engine ranking.
in order to justify the big price tag on the shopping portals I always felt the exposure, SEO and overall credibility was a benefit over the terrible ROI and thus a good investment. Problem for me was, that after last christmas, ALL my profits and then some went to the portals, and i still didnt make it to bizrates "trusted seller" or get to display ratings. You need 20 survay reviews from them in 90 days, etc. thats a lot of sales from a portal that actually costs me money versus breaking even. How did you maintain this without going broke?
shopping.com is a big problem, as they take your products, create pages for them, use SEO tactics and then those pages beat yours in the SERPS. they basically reroute YOUR SERP traffic thruogh them and then to you for a premium fee.
last christmas i did a search for my "widget a" and before my page for "widget a" was a page called "shopping.com - widget a from www.mysite.com" and the same for netag and pricegrabber. My page was bumped down for the "widget a" keyword thus traffic went to the portals - then to me. (sometimes they would group all my "widget a" products on a page and the user would click 7-9 times to view details and return to shopping.com)
Watch out for the adwords theese portals use too --- I spent 500.00 at pricegrabber, and ALL of the clicks came from (ill placed for my product type) ad campaign landing pages.
anyway - good luck with your review popups --- you know the more i think about it --- how annoying is it to see a survay on a checkout page, I know i kinda hate it. but imagine multiple survays from places i didnt even know about
