ChannelAdvisor

NexTag Testing a New Look

It seems that only a subset of users are seeing this, but NexTag is trying out a new look.

The home page has a larger splash area (which is currently Halloween focused), a very large search box, and more prominent navigation tabs.

The results pages are bolder and more colorful. The plus below the image lets you add the item to your shopping list, the chain finds similar products and the magnifying glass drills down to the product page (or to the retailer if no product page exists).

The price box on the right makes the offers stand out more. The big "Go!" buttons look nice, but they skip the product page and go directly to the retailer, which may have impact on conversion rate. But for the holiday shopping season, that could be a very desirable placement to drive volume. The "overview" page on Yahoo shopping and the coming Shopping.com product pages have similar "top offer" type areas, but unfortunately neither has the ability to notify merchants when they fall out of that placements. Maybe NexTag will be the first.

It's a little surprising that the NexTag logo on the results page pushes all the other content down and stands alone. Seems like a lot of white space. 

New Google Product Search Merchant Center and Merchant Blog

Google unveiled it's new Product Search Merchant Center today. The new interface consists mainly of existing features from the Google Base interface but repackaged and with some new navigation. In addition, Google introduced their new Merchant Blog. Since the vanity url for the merchant center (google.com/merchants) is much more widely focused, it may indicate that though this currently focuses on Product Search Merchants, it could become a centralized hub for retailers, integrating other Google products. Then again, it seems like having a retail focused version of AdWords with this Product Search merchant center integrated into it would make more sense.

Either way, I'm excited to see this and hope it leads to a higher level of engagement with merchants. Though the vast majority of online retailers are Google customers in some way, the only other retail specific Google vanity url of which I am aware (google.com/retail) points to Google's Retail Industry Knowledge Center, where the latest newsletter is dated April 2008.

Shopping.com Focusing on Engagement, User Experience, Traffic Quality

Historically, CSEs have been focused first and foremost on monetization, which in a CPC model generally means delivering traffic to retailers as quickly as possible. Over the last few years, we’ve seen the general tone of CSEs change to be more sensitive to merchant needs in terms of traffic quality and therefore, profitability. Shopping.com has been among those at the forefront of this shift, and over the last year or two, has taken several steps that are a direct reflection of that sentiment. Value based pricing, product level cost reporting automation, international traffic filtering, and CPC/logo pricing changes have all been well received by retailers over that time frame. Now, Shopping.com is continuing the trend by working to qualify consumers before the click, while also improving the customer experience.

In the spring, Shopping.com rolled out a new shopping experience in their shoe category. The new pages offered larger images, improved navigation, and clearer information on size and color. These changes resulted in some pretty strong stats, including a 55% increase in conversion rate. During this same time frame, they worked to expand their feed specification, asking merchants for more detailed product information. They are now looking to replicate that success in engagement and traffic quality in other categories. The new product pages they are rolling out later this year are heavy on content, integrating not only the merchant data from the expanded feed specification but also more detailed product rating info and third party video content. To help users find products more easily, they’ve improved their search algorithm. And not to be left out of the social networking trend, Shopping.com is introducing MyShopping pages to allow users to save favorites, create shopping lists, and generally spend more time on Shopping.com.

One thing is certain: the Shopping.com team has been very busy. They’ve built some significant enhancements to their program and are clearly working to strengthen their value proposition in the hopes of building a more loyal user base. In doing so, they’re stealing Bing Shopping’s thunder as a more effective “decision engine” through delivery of more relevant content, and positioning what their algorithm sees as the few “best” offers above the fold on the new product pages. (However, Shopping.com is not giving away money the way Bing is.)

Shopping.com is trying to strengthen its value proposition to merchants, too. Many CSEs have product rating content on site, either within their own system or powered by a third party. However, Shopping.com is putting a new twist on this by rolling out a product rating function that can integrate into retail sites at no charge. This allows retailers to gain such functionality at no cost, which is a big plus for smaller retailers. Shopping.com can then use that aggregated content on its properties. This effectively places them in competition with the PowerReviews Express product, though the enterprise level solutions of PowerReviews, BazaarVoice and Easy2 Technologies are likely not a long term competitive target.

Definitely looking forward to seeing the impact of these enhancements, and to the continued trend of delivering qualified traffic.

Come see us at shop.org

Shop.org's Fall annual summit starts later today in Vegas and ChannelAdvisor has a full crew.  In addition to our booth (#401), we have a full demo-room where we can give you a coke+cookie and show you a more comfortable walk through of our software for CSEs.  I have a fair amount of booth time so hope to see CSE Strategies readers there and answer any Q's you may have and talk about any topics you'd like to see us cover in the future.

Bing cashback webinar tomorrow - ChannelAdvisor + Bing / Microsoft

Tomorrow, September 15 @ 2pm ET, ChannelAdvisor is excited to co-present a webinar featuring Bing's cashback program.  I'll be the MC and we'll have Bruce Curling who runs BD for Bing's cashback program.

I was reviewing the presentation with Bruce today and learned quite a bit about the program that (even though I've been tracking it closely) were news items to me and helpful datapoints I've never seen before.  For example, did you know there are some interesting differences between Bing SEARCH cashback and Bing SHOPPING cashback?

You can register online via www.channeladisor.com/webinars today - or just click here.

Google Advertising Product Search on AdWords

We recently noticed that Google is "buying" AdWords ads that point to Google Product Search pages. This seems to be focused on very generic terms such as laptop, shoes, and digital cameras. Most of the ads we've seen have been in position five through nine, but in some cases, as high as two. In all cases, the landing page for the ad is just a search on the original query or a very similar term, meaning from the user's perspective, it is just like clicking on the "shopping" link at the top of SERPs.

Back in 2006, Google commented on the use of AdWords to promote their own products. Though there is quite a bit of language here around tools, algorithms, and quality scores, the relationship between the budget assigned to campaigns and the value to Google is not discussed in much detail. Google has indicated that "aggregators" that do not contain "original content" are likely to generate low landing page quality scores, which would need to be offset with high bids or click through rates. It's hard to know what the CTR is on these ads, but since Google is essentially paying themselves, it doesn't really matter. Their budgets can't literally be anything but they can certainly bid aggressively. The only thing they really lose is opportunity cost of other advertisers in those slots. Instead of selling that space, Google is driving this traffic to product search pages, which do contain ads, but not ads that are any different or better than the SERP the user is being taken away from. This implies that Google wants to drive users to product search links, which are currently not monetized, instead of ads that are monetized. It's possible they just want to build awareness of Product Search, but if these ads vanish, many users will not be able to find their way back to Product Search next time.

This is certainly good news for merchants with strong placement on Google Product Search pages for very generic queries like those on which Google is currently bidding as it could result in spikes of free traffic. It's not good news for other "aggregators" such as comparison shopping engines, who not only now have another competitor in AdWords, but are paying someone other than themselves for advertising and are therefore constrained by costs and performance metrics. This is also true for retailers, marketplaces, and any other AdWords advertisers bidding on these terms as a new competitor with effectively no budget constraints that are not bound by the same metrics has entered the playing field.

This has a wide range of implications for users, advertisers, and for Google. Just on the few queries that we identified, using Google's own traffic estimator tool, we estimate this to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars of monthly spend. That is lost money for Google, but also lost business for other AdWords advertisers. We'd love to hear from readers on what this means for your business.