Good and Bad at Shopping.com

We think Shopping.com is a great place to advertise and we've been drawing traffic from there for a couple of years.

The Shopping.com website is pretty much what you would expect from a shopping site. It looks a lot like Amazon or eBay with categorised pages of product listings and various search methods. The difference is that no transactions take place at the Shopping.com website. Listings link to an external website page specified by the advertiser (ideally the page where you can buy the product) and the advertiser is charged per click.

Initially it can be quite laborious to construct a datafeed of product details, but once that is mastered it is very simple to run a continuous campaign. We've been bidding the minimum $0.20 per click in the clothing category and receiving a steady stream of traffic.

Each product is separately listed with a searchable title and description. Each has a product photo, price, reviews and information about the seller's reputation. This means that a shopper has a lot of information about the product before clicking.

Shopping.com listings rank well in the search engines and are distributed to a number of affiliated shopping sites. If one wanted to get fast search engine ranking for a new site, it would be a great place to advertise.

I must confess that I have only just installed the code snippet which allows us to track sales conversions from their traffic. I've also installed the code that invites buyers to review GMtee (Shopping.com sends the buyer an e-mail a specified number of days after the transaction) and that will allow us to build a reputation. Now that this code is in place, I'm increasing our bids to a maximum of US$0.25. I'll let you know results in a month or two.

Now for two words of criticism: customer service! When the new GMtee website went live, I had to upload a revised datafeed. There was a problem processing the feed which resulted in many listings displaying half a photo, or no photo at all. Also they were still listing products that had been removed from the new datafeed.

I sent them an e-mail asking for help. Their performance pledge is to reply within seven working days, which seems about five days too many to me! We eventually received a form reply advising us to check our datafeed. I wrote back to assure them that our feed had no errors. Another week-and-a-half passed without reply.

I sent a third desperate plea for assistance and received a reply this morning. They say they've fixed the problem and that everything should be OK sometime in the next couple of days. Even if the problem is solved now, it's taken a month to communicate and that's just too long.