The other day a client asked me to remove the shipping cost information from their feed. This caught me by surprise. My first response was to give the advice that I always give to merchants: You should provide as much data to the shopping engines as you can. The more product information the consumer is able to get on the shopping engine, the less likely they will be to click over to your site just to get that information and before they are committed to a purchase… ie: your goal should be to attract less browsers and more buyers.

Needless to say, I asked the client about their concern. They felt that the total price (base + tax and shipping) displayed on the shopping engines was misleading for users who were interested in buying multiple items. Take the example below. This red polo is $29.50 at Gap.com. Shipping is a flat rate of $6, bringing the total to $35.50, which is the price prominently featured on Shopping.com.

Our client’s concern was that if a shopper wanted to buy two shirts, for example, they might do a quick calculation by doubling $35.50 and assume they would be charged $71. In fact, they would be paying for two shirts at $29.50 each with the same $6 flat rate for shipping, bringing the total to only $65.

I’d honestly never thought of this before. The client believed that that negative impact of removing shipping information from their feed might be offset by the positive impact of not misleading and deterring consumers who are interested in buying more than one item. I won’t tell you what I personally think because I’m a numbers guy myself. I’m all for testing and letting the results speak for themselves. As such, we removed the shipping cost information from one of the shopping engines as a test. We are waiting to see how it has affected both traffic volume and performance.

Some of the shopping engines don’t display tax and shipping in certain categories, so this issue doesn’t arise. Also, of those that do display it, some break out each charge and others roll it all up (like Shopping.com above). You would imagine that a consumer interested in buying multiple items would be more likely to calculate the correct total price given the first scenario… in fact, you simply can’t calculate it from the data Shopping.com presents. Delving into some of these engine specific scenarios made me realize that there is a separate post here (hence, part 1). Look out for Part 2…

Feel free to post up your thoughts on this strategy and the validity of this argument.