Shopping Comparison Engines

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Popular services

A very important part of the paid advertising is the shopping comparison engines.

Google Shopping

The most well-known of these is Google Shopping, and you’ve seen these when you’ve searched for products. Suppose you type in any type of e-commerce product, generally, so let’s take the bright golf trousers as an example, or digital cameras, or certain types of running shoes, any type of product offering. You will very often see small boxes that show a picture of the product with the price, and the website that you can buy it from underneath. This is the product called Google Shopping.

The products that are being shown there are all from websites that are paying to advertise that product in that position. It’s paid on a pay-per-click basis so that the advertiser will decide, “I’m willing to pay up to X amount for a click to my website and I want to show up on these type search terms. And this is the image and the product that I’d like you to show.”

It’s incredibly valuable to the retailers, and also to Google, and also to the shopper because it very quickly allows people to see exactly what the product is, in terms of the image of it, and the price it’s at. And it gives a very, very transparent view of the different prices available across all the different retailers, which really shortcuts the whole user journey. It’s very valuable to the consumer.

It’s very valuable to Google because it’s highly competitive amongst these retailers for that space, and as a result, retailers are willing to spend a lot of money to have their product show up in that space. And it’s very valuable to the retailer because it’s a great opportunity to get traffic to your site from people that you know are interested in buying your products. And it’s a really quick and easy way to show them how good your product looks.

PriceRunner and PriceGrabber

The other two examples of PriceRunner and PriceGrabber are a little bit different. They are specific sites that people go to, enter their search terms, and these sites will then very quickly trawl the Internet for the different places that those products are available. And they come back with a list of results that show all the different places you can buy the product and the different prices that they’re available at.

So the key thing to understand with these services are is they just make it very easy for shoppers to quickly see the different price points that they can get the same products at from all across the Internet. So it makes it very transparent for the user, which is great for them getting lower prices, and really encourages competition between different retailers. But also means that retailers and branded suppliers need to be very strategic about what their pricing and distribution strategy is so that they can get the best balance of maximizing sales while maintaining margin.