As most of you may know, a number of the big shopping engines have increased their minimum bid rates through the holiday season, some as much as 25%. That rate increase will be coming back down to normal levels in January. But beware! I just noticed this message from NexTag which translates as: “We automatically raised your rates through the holidays, but when the rate increase drops January 2nd, YOU must MANUALLY bring your bids back down to where they were before.” Seriously?

“…Please note that NexTag will not automatically lower rates on your behalf.”

They automatically raised them on your behalf. The least they could do is automatically lower them back to where they were just before the rate increase. Seems like an easy way to make a few more bucks to me. Merchants are still very busy during the month of January. I’m sure most merchants won’t be savvy and prepared to be logging in at the crack of dawn on January 3nd so they can bring their rates back down to where they were before the holiday. Please put it on your calendar!

A little while ago I wrote about a client who was not satisfied with the way Shopping.com was displaying shipping cost. They actually thought it may be negatively impacting their campaign performance, so they had SingleFeed remove that data from their Shopping.com feed. The results are in and the client reported a noticeable decrease in their product ranking. This is understandable because Shopping.com, and most other shopping engines, give ranking preference to items with complete tax and shipping information (they believe it provides a better user experience). Despite the visible difference, traffic volume only declined slightly. This could be misleading because their test was running during the beginning of the holiday shopping season, so they should have been seeing a nice bump. Therefore, relatively flat volume during this specific test could actually be indicative of a greater loss. The client also reported no significant change in the number of orders they received. If the number of orders stayed the same, and traffic declined ever so slightly, that would actually indicate an increase in their conversion rate, albeit small. Please don’t run out and remove shipping cost from your feed in hopes of an increased conversion rate based in this one, tiny test. The holiday season no doubt had an effect on their conversion rate, too… so there is a big unquantifiable variable in this A/B test. Nonetheless, the point is this: test for yourself. The results may surprise you. Test not only shipping cost, but the structure of your titles, your bid amounts, your images, your pricing, your promotional messages, etc… what works for some products or categories won’t work for others… and, likewise, a strategy that works on Nextag may not work on Pricegrabber. Also, removing shipping cost may not have as big an effect for our client (an apparel retailer) as it would for a big screen TV retailer, whose shipping costs are a much larger factor for their customers.

eBay has PayPal. Google has Google Checkout. And now Amazon will have Bill Me Later.

According to the press release via Techcrunch, Amazon will invest in Bill Me Later and also add Bill Me Later as a payment option on Amazon.com.

In the Shopping Search panel at SES, someone asked about these alternative payment options and which ones to go with, thinking that listing 7 different options was too overwhelming for the consumer. While I agree that just pasting all options on the checkout page can be confusing, the best response from the panel (I think it was Scot) was to test test test.

I think that these alternative payment options are great ways to increase conversion rate, but merchants will never know until they add the option and then do A/B testing to figure out the best way to present the alternative payment option.

With Google Checkout, there is an added concern about who owns the customer in the long run, but in the short to medium term, there seems to be a great opportunity.

Here are some stats from Bill Me Later:

-47% of Bill Me Later transactions from new customers
-46% higher repeat usage
-50%+ increase in average order value, up to 150% when combined with promotional financing
-Low operating risk, since Bill Me Later works with existing payment processes
-30-40% lower transaction costs

PayPal also claims that adding its Express Checkout button will:

-Improve conversion rates. Express Checkout conversion is 40% higher than other checkouts
-Increase sales by 14% on average

Merchants are always asking SingleFeed account managers for data feed optimization (DFO) tips. Well, sometimes the DFO advice is sitting right in the help section of the shopping engines. Here’s what Shopping.com has to say about optimizing feeds that contain non-productized products (clothing, accessories, etc.):

For these categories you can optimize your product names to make your listings more relevant. The preferred product name structure is:

[”Product Brand” “Descriptive Copy” “Product Type”]

Here are some examples of good product names that follow this structure:

Nike Shox Turboz Running Shoe
McCartney “Proud American” Dog Breed T-Shirt
Marvel Heroes Chess Set
Spalding Official Size Top Flite 100 Basketball

Keep in mind that you can only make a product most relevant to a specific search. For example, “Spalding Official Size Top Flite 100 Basketball” is great relevance if the shopper searches for “Basketball”, but the relevance is slightly lower if the shopper searches for “Spalding.” Product names should be specific and succinct. You can use product descriptions to include additional descriptive information.

In our non-productized categories, for most searches there are several ties for relevance. In the event there is a tie, here is the order of tie-breakers we use to determine who is listed first:

- Trusted Store
- Is the item In Stock
- Higher overall Store Rating
- Higher number of Store Reviews
- Displaying Tax and Shipping cost
- Is Add-On Logo turned on
- Higher Bid

For searches with less than four matches, all listings will be “Featured Products.”