Shopping Comparison Engines Will Boost Sales

Let's take a look at your top shopping strategies:

Pay for an enhanced listing. Some shopping engines, such as Nextag.com, will allow you to pay your way to a top listing. The ones that charge you based on the cost per click usually give you the option of paying more for each click to appear higher in the results. Others will allow you to pay a flat fee for top billing or to display an advertisement for your products across their networks.

Compete on price. On shopping sites such as PriceGrabber, Shopping.com and Shopzilla, the products with the lowest prices appear at the top by default. Other sites allow users to sort listings by price even if that's not the default. So in a highly competitive area, you may want to discount your product to attract shoppers.

These lowest-price shopping engines work best if you're selling collectibles or hard-to-find items; otherwise you're competing against the likes of Wal-Mart (WMT Quote), Sony (SNE Quote) and Office Depot (ODP Quote).

Boost your merchant/user rating. At sites such as Yahoo! Shopping and Shopping.com, your merchant rating increases as you attract more customers and get glowing customer reviews for your site and products. The higher your merchant rating, the higher you'll appear in the listings. So encourage your customers to review your products and Web site for you. If that doesn't work, offer an incentive.

Optimize your product listings for relevant keywords. Shopping engines such as Google Base and MSN Live Product Search display listings based on their relevance to keyword searches. You upload your product listings to shopping sites through data feeds. These provide fields for you to describe your product in detail. It's essential to optimize your data feeds if you want your listing to appear when someone searches for what you offer.