Update on PriceGrabber and Yahoo Shopping Partnership

By Mark Vandergrift, ChannelAdvisor

On March 11th, Yahoo's Product Submit program was officially ended and PriceGrabber's system began powering the Yahoo Shopping site. The added traffic from the Yahoo user base reversed a previous declining trend in traffic from the PriceGrabber network that ChannelAdvisor customers have seen since the beginning of 2010. The other major paid shopping engines (Shopzilla, Shopping.com, and NexTag) had been experiencing declines over that time frame as well but none as steep as that of PriceGrabber prior to the start Yahoo partnership.

However, accompanying the increase in traffic, ChannelAdvisor customers are also seeing degradation in conversion rate delivered by the PriceGrabber network. The trend is not drastic, but it comes at a time when the conversion rate for all other major engines is increasing. It's not uncommon to see conversion rates decline as traffic increases, but it is possible that the Yahoo Shopping's conversion rate, which historically has been much lower than average, is pulling down the conversion rate of the PriceGrabber network.

If you advertise on PriceGrabber, continue monitoring the conversion rate of each of your offers and be sure to take action on those that are incurring high levels of traffic but not generating sales.