Recommended Comparison Shopping Engines

Our core recommendation is to maximize your product exposure on free shopping engines first. There are three of note: Google Product Search, Bing Shopping, and TheFind.

These three free shopping engines, once properly tuned, can provide a solid stream of new customers to your website with no pay-per-click fees. The only downside is that competition is fierce among the free shopping engines. Having an optimized product data feed created by VersaFeed will help ensure your products compete successfully.

In addition, be sure to maximize your exposure by following some basic tips and tricks.

If you are looking to expand further, the only options are pay-per-click. Please consider that in order to have any successful pay-per-click campaign, you will need Google Analytics installed on your website with the ecommerce component enabled. You will also need a few hours per month (at least initially) devoted to bid management.

Amazon Product Ads has the highest conversion rates of any of the pay-per-click shopping engines and is highly recommended after the free shopping engines have been conquered. There are a few caveats however:

• Amazon only allows certain product categories in Amazon Product Ads. Currently available categories (look for "eligible categories").
• Even though Amazon currently has the best ROI of the pay-per-click shopping engines, it still requires product profit margins of at least 15-20% to see meaningful ROI. If you retail product lines with significantly lower margins, we do not recommend listing them on Amazon.

Lastly, VersaFeed recommends listing on Shopzilla, NexTag, PriceGrabber, and Shopping.com for product lines which have profit margins of at least 25%. These shopping channels can be very valuable for some retailers, however, we recommend maximizing your exposure on Amazon and the free shopping channels before listing on these sites.