Onefeed Comparison Shopping Blog: July 2009

As of 23rd June 2009 Shopping.com has announced a major change to the way their rate card is structured and also charged. Thankfully this change has been for the better. With current market conditions as they are, a change like this has been welcomed by merchants, which alleviates the burden of high pre-recession CPC rates. Some of the categories have seen a massive drop in the CPC rate. The most notable areas to have seen drops are in computing and electronics. Televisions have seen a huge slash in the rate from 48p down to 15p or 10p (price dependant). This must be very attractive for merchants as this should give them the opportunity to try more products and keep them live for longer before removing the non-performers.

A major note of the change in the rate card is the tiering of pricing. In some category areas there are three divisions of cost. A good example of this is in clothing, where anything above £30 in value (inc VAT) is 16p a click (no change from original rate), anything below £15 in value is 8p and anything in between is 11p. At last you might say a shopping site that takes into account the value of the products you are selling! This pricing structure is replicated across quite a few categories. The actual costs for each category are in the pdf document below.

I personally think that this change is fantastic, it means merchants can advertise more of their inventory and not get penalised due to the value of the products. It has been something that merchants have been calling for and thankfully Shopping have listened. It remains to be seen who else follows suit and tries something similar.