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Introduction to Bizrate / Shopzilla |
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This is a brief introduction to Bizrate/Shopzilla.
Shopzilla, Inc. is the parent company that owns
both BizRate- and Shopzilla-branded shopping search engine products. Currently,
BizRate-branded banners are provided to Affiliate partners for website
placement. Shopzilla helps shoppers
instantly find virtually anything on sale from anyone, anywhere on the Web at
the best price and offers a powerful comparison tools and BizRate consumer
reviews of stores and products, the Web's largest and most trusted consumer
feedback network. Shopzilla powers shopping search for many of the Web's
largest consumer sites including AOL, Lycos, Time Warner's RoadRunner, and many
others. BizRate is still probably best
known under that name, but on November 16, 2004, it was renamed to Shopzilla. For now, there are two
distinct websites while the transition proceeds.
With home offices in Los
Angeles, California, BizRate has been online since 1996, and terms itself
as a shopping search engine, rather than a comparison shopping site. This is a
small, but significant difference that sets it apart in many ways from very
similar setups that call themselves "comparison shopping" sites.
A major difference between Shopzilla and other comparison shopping sites is they
use a proprietary algorithm called ShopRank to rank their reported more than 30
million products offered by more than 40,000 stores. ShopRank uses the parameters of not just
relevance as search engines usually do, but it also includes the "reputation"
of the merchant into the mix. The
details for the reputation field in the algorithm is compiled from details
obtained from over 1 million monthly purchasers.
Perhaps as a result of the unique ShopRank reputation fields, Shopzilla does a
lot of work in the field of customer feedback.
This focus has caused Shopzilla to include operating consumer
satisfaction surveys for many of its merchants as well as consumer websites,
including AOL. The attention to feedback and feedback offerings assists merchants
with research, but it also places the Shopzilla name in front of a consumer's
eyes one more time after a purchase is made, which could increase their
percentage of repeat shoppers or send new users their way who are curious about
Shopzilla.
Shopzilla offers free listings to any merchant, but if a free listing is judged
by ShopRank to be equally as relevant as an ad from a store that has paid
Shopzilla, the paid reference will be ranked higher to the non-paid reference. An important note for a reseller is that
ShopRank provides preference to the paying content, only (as they describe)
when the relevance of multiple references are calculated to be equal. If paying for an ad only improves your ranking
as a tie-breaker, then a careful designed free listing may obtain higher
results then other free content and paying content then on other shopping
sites. Shopzilla offers ROI-related
tools for its advertisers. These ROI
tools can help sellers in bidding for position on results pages, reports on all
aspects of the seller's account, and ultimately calculating ROI. Access to the
"Customer Certified" ratings is a helpful marketing tool.
Some additional features on the new search engine is that is programmed to
recognize and correct spelling errors for both a product name and its brand. Sure you can spell RCA, but there are quite a
few new suppliers who offer real tongue twisters when it comes to the brand
name. It can also search by weight or height or other types of measurements. Some other features added to the "new"
BizRate is the ability to keep a shopping list for future comparison, reviews
of products from professional sources as well as buyers and a section called
Top Picks to showcase the best-priced, most popular and highly rated products.
Another interesting feature is the SmartChoice identification, which indicates
the lowest price from a business that has been highly rated (via the
certification method) and has the item in stock. This, combined with the
ability to browse by more parameters easier should make Shopzilla more popular
than the previous setup on BizRate.
One thing to note is that Shopzilla allows you to "pay for leads on a
cost-per-click basis and change the price-per-click you pay as often as you
want". However, there is a difference between "cost per click" and "pay per
click". The standard definition of PCP means you pay when someone clicks on
your ad and is taken to your website, while CPC can involve the prior clicks to
reach that final buying point. The terms are sometimes used interchangeably,
but they can indicate different measurement metric that can significantly affect
your ad campaign cost and strategy. |
