Forum Moderators: open
Industry: home decor
Test length: 3 weeks
Clicks: 2383
Cost-per-click: 15 cents
Conversion rate: 0.67%
Amount spent: $350 (US)
Total sales: $438
Expense/Sales: 81%
We signed-up and paid the initial required $200 deposit. It took a bit of back-and-forth to get the data feed file just right, but after a few days we got the 10,000 products loaded. It took another few days for them to process, approve, and categorize the products.
I was very happy with the management tools, especially the Click Reports tool which shows all of the above stats on a single page for any desired time frame.
Unfortunately, our overall Dealtime/Shopping.com return on investment, at 81% cost of revenue just for the PPC, just wasn't good enough to continue. At times, it had been as good as 50%, which we could probably live with a while longer had it continued at that rate (a single large sale probably skewed things a bit). In contrast, Adwords PPC charges are, on average, about 12% of our sales tied to Adwords.
We will likely try Shopping.com again for a limited-run, now that our account is established and it is just a matter of making another deposit.
No wonder - these are price comparison services where the cheapest deal wins and everyone loses. Which brings me to strategic consideration that is usually ignored by short term marketers - why help establish these places so that they can become dominant power? The best thing, especially for a big brand, is to avoid them like plague.
Do not help in any way - if people know about you, and won't find you there, then they might go over and check your site. Getting into e-commerce only to get retail style middlemen is short-sighted.
