Anybody tried promoting e-commerce websites through Shopping Comparison sites?
If you did how is your experience?
Comparing sites, is good, when you want to know your competitors, and how they do their campaigns, and the promotions they have. It’s a goog way to have your enemies closer than your friends.
Comparision Shopping sites can be extremely effective at getting quality traffic but they are also well utilized by experienced merchants and highly competitive. Always worth a try but realize that those you compete against will generally be well optimized, have strong margins and in many categories, willing to take a loss to gain a customer for the long tem.
so you are saying they are more effective as marketing tool rather then making a profit tool?
No, I’m saying they can be a very effective customer acquisition tool. However, in more established and recurring markets, you will discover that rather than driving a single sale many etailers focus on the lifetime or first year value of a customer, if you do not operate this way it can be hard to compete in a medium where everyone is so optimized. Of course this isn’t true of all categories, all advertisers or even all CSEs.
Thats interesting, but sure make sense. Their strategy seem to focus on a long time goal rather then short term sale. I will give it a shot see if it works.
Btw which ones you think might be better to start with for a new business, there are quite a few established ones. I just dont wanna drain lot of money without much results.
The problem with comparison sites are that they often contain out of date information (I’ve seen it time and time again) against the price on the actual website, their only good at getting customers if you can guarantee you’re the “bottom dweller” in terms of bidding the lowest price possible and they tend to favour brands which give them financial incentive. It’s almost a case of paying a premium to sell the cheapest… a bad business model. 
Alex, brand reputation & speed to order can also play a hand in results and after running campaigns with various CSEs I can honestly say that while price is very important, it is not a requirement to be the absolute bottom player to drive sales at a profitable rate. Of course if the bottom priced site is reliable, and drives a sale easily it’s a hard battle but users tend to click 2-4 ads and compare them on product cost, shop rating, options and even experience.