Pricegrabber Merchant Question

[zaizai]

Hi all,

So I have created a merchant account at Pricegrabber and have a some products indexed and live on their site. I have a question and wasn't able to find a direct answer from the site and it is a weekend so no one from Pricegrabber is actually reachable. So, I would like to know if someone here knows the answer.

My product feed have been running for about a day now and I am experiencing a spike in traffic. The traffic I have a question about are referral traffic from Pricegrabber's partner sites. For example, lets say that I have 10 clicks from Pricegrabber.com and 20 clicks from compare99.com and 20 from supsale.com.

Am I paying fees from all 50 clicks because they are parnters of Pricegrabber?


That is the one question.



The second question is about Pricegrabber account balance.

So I put in the min deposit of $50 to get the account set up at Pricegrabber. Now the feed is running. Great.

Will the clicks stop once the $50 worth of clicks from Pricegrabber and the other referral sites are reached?

I would think so. That is how other engines work. But I have to ask this time because I can tell you right now that I have received more than $50 worth of clicks from pricegrabber and it hasn't stopped. I am still getting a lot of traffic even though I have only $50 in the account.

How can I get them to stop the feed as I am well over my budget if I have to pay for more than what I was expecting to pay ($50).

It is really troubling that Pricegrabber would continue advertising my products even though my spend budget is gone.

(I have tried to stop the feed, but there isn't any way for me to do it when logged into the member area on Pricegrabber.com. They don't make it easy to do that is for sure.)

Any feedback to this would be nice.

Thanks

[Wlauzon]

The problems you mention, and others such as very poor ROI, are why we stopped using Price Grabber after about 1 month.

[CPC_Andrew]

- Yes you will be charged for all partner clicks from Pricegrabber. You can adjust your CPC bid in the merchant login to be below rate card in order to lower costs and increase ROI.

- The fastest way to stop any further charges from Pricegrabber is to send them a blank feed. Pricegrabber may charge you more than that ammount as your products are listed on their website and they are sending traffic to your site. It's frustrating but unfortunately that's how it works.

Comparison shopping engines are often frustrating for business owners because there's no cheat sheet written on what to know before using them. What I can tell you is that depending on the number of products you have and your category you can be successful on Pricegrabber, it's one of the best performing comparison shopping engines online.

[zaizai]

Thanks for that bit of information. I have read the policies and I haven't seen anywhere where it states that they can and will go beyond your account balance. To be honest, going over your account budget a little I can understand, but Pricegrabber went WAY WAY over the budget. I mean were talking from a $50 initial amount in my account, in one day, they sent over $3,000 dollars of clicks! Now it is the second day since my account has been active and I have stopped the feed by doing what you described...I did the blank feed thing yesterday in hopes that it would get updated over the night...and it did. However, I got an email this morning from Pricegrabber saying that my account is going to be stopped because I didn't have enough funds. No Sh*t.

Like I said, I would be ok with a little over the budget, but what they did is unthinkable. My plan was to get a good feed up and test the service out with the $50 but something went very wrong I think on their end.

Are you suggesting that what they did is normal and legal? When you say normal, do you mean that the action is in writing in policy somewhere? I mean this feels like bad business practices. Don't you agree?

Anyway, I am very sure that someone will call me first thing tomorrow morning about this. I am not a happy camper right now.

Very stressful.

[zaizai]

I have used many other comparison sites before and they always have limits. Usually they use what you have in you balance. I personally have never used a service where they went over what I had in the account. Having said that, I can not believe that what they did with my account was legal.

What do other, more experienced, people think about what they did? Would you make a case with Pricegrabber if you were in my shoes?

[CPC_Andrew]

I'm saying it's not unheard of. I've seen it multiple times with merchants who go live on Pricegrabber.

Agreed it's not the best experience for the merchant, especially during the first time using the shopping engine.