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.