Shopzilla / Bizrate optimization

Bizrate.com and Shopzilla.com are owned by the same company, Scripps. They share a common data feed and customer reviews. The product listings are the same on both though the layouts are obviously different. They are both major shopping search engines in their own rights.

CSEO: Relevancy / Matching

As in all major CSEs focus on the product title and description.   Seed the title and description with the highest traffic (more common) keywords that have strong product relevancy. The last thing you want is to pay for a lot of traffic that isn’t relevant to your products (the curious rather than the converted).

For product listings that are driven by part number you need to focus on matching to the channels common page for that / those item(s).  For product listing that are not part number / model number / UPC / ISBN / Muse, etc. driven… you’ll want to focus on keyword seeding (stuffing is such an ugly term) to increase relevancy on terms with the highest affinity to a given listing.

Bottom-line:  Relevancy matters.  Even in a bid driven marketplace like Shopzilla / Bizrate… relevancy real does matter and is a factor in the search results.  People also have the option of resorting based on relevancy.  Most importantly, no matter what you bid you don’t want your products appearing on irrelevant search results.  That will really drag down your ROI by sending you loads of unqualified clicks.

Merchant Ratings

Customer Feedback is king on Bizrate and also Shopzilla.  You must have ’street cred’ in terms of good merchant ratings if you are going to have a great ROI on these two shopping channels.  The search results pages, especially for consumer electronics are getting very crowded and the new comers are at a major disadvantage compared to those who have been on the channel for years and have thousands or 10’s of thousand of strongly positive reviews.   To get merchant certified you need 100 reviews and to keep them flowing in on a trailing 90 day roll.  Get that survey code in place…  create some very strong offers… get some sales and take care of the clients to get those reviews built up!

So the general rule is that Shopzilla / Bizrate Customer Certified merchants appear below the Featured Stores, sorted by price, including shipping.  Merchants without shipping & handling information appear at the bottom of this group. Merchants that are not Shopzilla Customer Certified appear at the bottom of search results, sorted by price.  You won’t be able to bid your way in to featured store status unless you are certified.

Bottom-line:  Be aggressive in building merchant / customer reviews.  Here’s what you can do.

Deploy: Deploy their survey code for all orders (not just ones from visitors referred by Shopzilla / Bizrate).

1. Rotate: Rotate Shopzilla / Bizrate code along with the other CSEs you are advertising on
2. Preempt: Get certified before you advertise.  What a concept!  You can get an account with BizRate, publish a few products… and work aggressively to get merchant reviews from all your web site order traffic.  Why spend money marketing on Shopzilla when you don’t have street cred and will just lose out to certified competitors?  Unless you’ve got a name brand with a good reputation,  I’m not exactly sure why you’d spend a lot of money on these channels before being certified.  Get certified first and then you can market efficiently second.
3. Ask everyone: Ask everyone you know who has ever ordered from you to give you a positive merchant review.  Customers can go directly to Bizrate and leave one.  They do not need to be referred from a Bizrate / Shopzilla customer feedback survey form.  You may send links to solicit customer feed back out in your order ship notification emails and in at a dozen other creative ways.  Of course, it is unethical to pay anyone for a merchant review but it is 100% ethical and very smart to ask your customer for them.  Customers like to have a voice.

Bidding

Bizrate / Shopzilla support product level bidding in the data feed.  This is awesome.  Use it to your advantage.  Why category bid when you can do it on the product level?  Track product listing level ROI.  Bid top converters up to your breakeven CPC (see how to calculate breakeven CPC in another post by that name) in small increments and chart the effect on traffic, conversion and ROAS / GPROAS.  Take the profits to bank.

Note: All bids are max bids.  You’ll not pay more than a penny higher CPC than the next highest bidder.  On that point, If you do log into their Merchant management interface you can see the top bidders at the category level, along with the merchant names and their bids.  If you’re going to play with a significant amount of chips on the table you’ll want to monitor the players in your categories.

Logos

They will generally cost you a dime more a click.  This varies by category.

Holiday rates

Like most major CSEs their rates increase typically by 25% during the Holiday season

Comments? Let me know your thoughts below. We’d all benefit by a good discussion on Shopzilla / Bizrate.