What is a Shopping Comparison/Datafeed Website?

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One of the more complex promotion strategies is a shopping comparison or datafeed website. A datafeed is an electronic product catalog that merchants provide their affiliates. This datafeed allows affiliates to build a dynamic website featuring individual products and services offered by their merchants.

A good shopping comparison website allows visitors to compare prices, features, reviews, and merchants side by side. Building a shopping comparison website usually requires you to have some programming knowledge, or to hire somebody that does. In most cases, it simply requires you to copy and paste
some code into your webpages.

Shopping comparison sites typically do not charge users anything to use the site. Instead, they are monetized through payments from retailers who are listed on comparison shopping site. Depending on the particular business model of the comparison shopping site, retailers will either pay a flat fee to be included on the comparison shopping site or pay a fee each time a user clicks through to the retailer web site or pay every time a user completes a specfied action.

Here is an overview of some tools that you can use and what they do:

GoldenCan
Affiliates can easily add merchant datafeeds to their website. The service features product datafeeds, coupon datafeeds, and product search capabilities. Setup takes less than 5 minutes, and copying and pasting some code into your webpage.

WebMerge
This is a datafeed tool that will allow you to turn any electronic product catalog into static web pages. Anybody can learn how to use this tool.

Suggestions for Building a Shopping Comparison Site

• Build a shopping comparison website around a single product or service category
• Update your website with the latest product catalog from your merchant. Sometimes items go out of stock, or get discontinued.

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Well iI really like this idea. The very nature of the comparison shopping site means that price competition will be intense.There are many large players who have invested significant time and money to have daily feedback on their channels with amazing specificity. They will have a significant informational advantage over the smaller merchant who does not have this data or lacks the analytic skills.Start by putting as many of your products into the feed for a shopping comparison site as possible.