WebProNews

Savvy consumers make use of the Internet to shop and compare products and services. A SES San Jose session on shopping search engines tipped attendees on the best ways to get those visitors into the shopping cart.

SES: Shopping For Searching Shoppers

(Our on-scene WebProNews staff has passed along this latest news from SES San Jose 2007. If you can't be there, you need to be here with WebProNews this week, for videos and reports.)

Bob Reeves of Marchex emphasized the importance of the data feed, the critical path for product information that flows from a commerce site to a shopping search engine. Product data provided to the feed should be as complete as possible.

He recommended starting in high margin areas, and tailoring product submissions to each individual shopping engine. Sometimes products fail to do well in shopping engines. That shouldn't be the end of testing that product, though.

Improving that performance may be a matter of tweaking what can be optimized, like titles and descriptions. Sellers have to be realistic, and look at the impact their pricing may have on sales, too.

Brian Mark of Toolbarn.com said sellers have to overcome difficulties with shopping engines. He cited rising CPC, limited tracking tools from those engines, and incomplete reporting from analytics vendors who don't always get shopping engine data right.

Knowing the clicks can help with this. Determining when clicks associate with sales makes it easier to figure out when to adjust prices. Track and know as much as you can about that shopping engine traffic.