Get the most out of your CSE efforts

As click costs rise, the number of comparison shopping engines grow and existing players continue to refine their feed specs, category offerings and site features, where should you direct your attention as a retailer?

InternetRetailer's got a great write-up, breaking down how to build a winning CSE strategy in 12 steps.  Bonus: quotes from Mr Wingo himself and eBags, a ChannelAdvisor client.

Some choice excerpts:

While platforms such as ChannelAdvisor’s provide one answer, merchants who have their hands full keeping on top of feeds with or without outside help might easily be tempted to ignore new feed specs that an engine labels as “optional.” But they do so at their own risk. “Any new thing the engines do, they call optional because they want everything to be backwards-compatible,” Wingo says. But, imagine that a new option is showing shoppers shipping costs by ZIP code. If a consumer enters a ZIP code and wants to see shipping costs, but the retailer has opted out of providing that information, the retailer won’t show up in those results.

As an example, Wingo says one of the shopping engines producing the highest conversion rates for merchants using ChannelAdvisor’s services is a very small comparison engine for hand tools on BobVila.com. “It is such a great match between audience and product set that the conversion rates are huge,” he says. “It’s not a top-25 shopping engine, but it drives more qualified leads and sales than you would on a PriceGrabber or one of the others.”

It’s just one of the many options that merchants need to keep in view in understanding that comparison shopping engines aren’t a set-it-and-forget-it proposition, and in seeking to keep their programs matched up with the fast-changing environment. “Without changing your strategy, if you look at it on the surface, comparison shopping engines are getting more expensive, just like paid search,” says Wingo. “We work with retailers to tweak their strategy and find ways to fight that inflation. There is a lot you can do now with optimization.”

Written by Scott Hurff -- scott.hurff at channeladvisor