Top 8 Comparison Shopping Engines for Your eCommerce Site
Shopping will not be complete without the act of comparing prices. You may have seen people do this in shopping malls where they hop from shop to shop not buying anything. What they are doing in that process is more than window shopping. It is often because they are comparing prices.
Online, it is quite common for customers to ‘shop around’ by looking for the same product in different websites and comparing prices. And even if the product is unique to one brand, they would often look for similar products from different brands and compare. Why do they do this? Well, it is obvious that customers want to get the most out of their money.
Comparers are usually careful shoppers who doesn’t want to buy anything that they’ll regret afterwards. With careful planning, they scour the Internet for websites, coupons and deals that will help them get the item that they want for a lower price. Of course, it is not entirely about price but on quality as well. But they will usually go for products with great reviews and an affordable price tag.
What are Comparison Shopping Engines?
Comparison shopping engines also known as CSEs are websites that scrape the prices, images and details of products in reputable shopping retailers and display all the information that it has collected it in one webpage. This is often done when the searcher has inputted the product name or has done a search query. With it, shoppers can compare prices, shipping rates and reviews of services in one page.
Here’s how it works. Let’s say you visit a comparison shopping site like Nextag. If you input an item like ‘Samsung Galaxy S8’, it will give you the following results.

As you can see, it allows you to see the product’s price and details in different retailers. In the side, it also allows you to choose the category, limit the price and choose the brand of the products that you like.
Comparison shopping sites are inspired by the human behavior of constantly comparing prices before buying. With CSEs, the act of ‘comparing’ is done for the customer. Instead of the customer scanning the Internet for shopping websites and listing the prices one-by-one, this website crawls and indexes product links and prices in one convenient URL. The result is go-to website for hundreds and thousands of comparison shoppers around the world.
Why Get Listed?
The tremendous amount of traffic alone is enough of a reason for eCommerce websites to tap these platforms if they want to increase their sales.
But it can do more than that. Here are three reasons why getting listed in comparison shopping engines is a must.
Comparison Shopping Engines Can Drive Traffic to Your Website
First, it can help them get more traffic to their website. After all, there is nothing better than a recommendation from another reputable website. A simple listing is often enough to get people to click on your website link to know more and this can result to a boost of traffic in your website.
Comparison Shopping Engines Can Help with SEO
Also, since you’ll be getting a link from a reputable website, it can also do wonders for your search engine ranking. Search engine optimization is all about getting quality backlinks to your website. The higher the quality and amount of backlinks, the higher your ranking will be. Since most of the popular comparison shopping engines are reputable and has tons of traffic, the link that they can give you is often very high quality.
Comparison Shopping Engines Can Strengthen your Brand
Third, it strengthens your brand. Think about it. How will you view a brand if it is placed alongside some of the leading brands in the industry? Wouldn’t you instantly view the brand as reputable as well? It is the science of correlation. It is when one brand is viewed as good when it is put alongside a similar yet more popular brand that it gains instant credibility.
That is what comparison shopping engines can do for you when they feature you.
Now that you know how important comparison shopping engines are for eCommerce businesses, it is time to do some exploring. Let us take a closer look at some of the most popular comparison shopping websites that you can use for your business.
NexTag
Looking for a product? I think that there is no better comparison shopping tool than NexTag. I love it for its easy search and filter feature.
Operating since 1999, Nextag is one of the most popular comparison shopping websites on the Internet. With over 30 million visitors per month, it is a website that is worth listing your eCommerce website on. In fact, it is considered as a top performing comparison shopping website according to CPC Strategy’s quarterly review. The best part is that it doesn’t end with just products. Nextag can also compare event ticket, real estate and travel prices.
Searching a product on the website is really straightforward. When you visit its link, you’ll see a page that has a search bar.

Upon searching, you’ll see that it will instanty display items that are relevant to the keyword you entered.

As you can see, it displays the name of the retailers (Amazon, eBay, etc.), its price and the product name.
But there’s one problem. It seems that the search feature is not yet as refined. As you can see, I have searched for Samsung S8 but the returned results at the top is not relevant to what I have searched for. So that is something that they can improve on.

Then, you can also sort products according to the left sidebar. You can choose the price and the brand.

And it doesn’t stop there. You can also filter through items right to their free shipping discounts. Pretty neat, huh?
Price Grabber
True to its name, price grabber ‘grabs’ the price of various items and puts them in one webpage. More than serving customers, it has a feature that makes it just all-too-enticing for eCommerce website owners to get listed.
Note: This article was originally published on the OSI Affiliate Blog. To see the whole article you can go here http://www.osiaffiliate.com/blog/top-8-comparison-shopping-engines-ecommerce-site.
