Creating shopping portal - Any suggestions?

[brian.mark]

I'm currently in the process of designing a shopping portal. Does anyone have any pet peeves with the current ones that you would like to share? What do you currently like?

I'll start this discussion off:

Many of the portals charge for spiders that follow the links to your site, as well as charging for each time the same visitor clicks on one of your products. The nature of a shopping portal is to click, back, click, back (comparisons, right?) so the ROI drops when someone clicks that final time (2nd, 3rd, 4th time) to finally make the purchase. Unique visitors is what I expect to pay for, not each click and spider.

[qsilver]

It make sense what you are saying about unique visitors ...

I was not aware that portals charge for spiders? Do you know how much?

[ZUK]

Your timing couldn't be better!
I am about to expand my Website, and need a Shopping Page Function.
Funnily enough, Lunarpages came across as one of the better value ISP's for this.
Check though as to if you get to keep your Domain name if you change ISP's, what the Bandwidth limits are, and if you get charged a percentage of individual Sales; if so how much.
Looking forward to more responses on this.
Stephen
Webmaster@www.Zuks-Un-Ltd-Uk.freeservers.com and Club ZULU

[brian.mark]

I am not talking about a shopping cart or hosting, Zuk. A shopping portal is someone like BizRate.com, Shopping.com, NexTag.com, Froogle.com (free, but still a shopping portal), etc.

Qsliver, I can't say for certain, but it appears as if most of the PPC portals charge for a full click for each spider. That's the only way I can get the numbers to match what they bill me for. Adds some value in deep links to my site, though, so I am grateful for that. Sure beats what I could pay for a link elsewhere, but it's still one of my complaints with most of these engines.

[qsilver]

Last week I was making a research on topic "How to create a shopping portal"

The best thing that I found was
http://www.kapowtech.com/solutions_datacollection.htm

Have a look and tell what do you think about it.

By the way do you made your own research? It will be interesting what do you found about that topic?

[grlambert]

I just received this message yesterday.

Dear Overture Advertiser,

During a recent review of our systems, we discovered that your account has been inadvertently overcharged $61.75 for clicks to your site due to a technical error. We want you to know that we sincerely regret this miscalculation,and we apologize for overcharging your account. We have corrected this issue and have credited your Overture account in full. Please be assured that we have taken immediate steps to prevent this from happening again.

We value your business and appreciate your understanding.
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us using the Support link found at the bottom of nearly all pages within the DirecTraffic Center(R) at http://dtc.overture.com.

Again, we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Sincerely,

Your Partners at Overture

I don't know how many times this has happened with the Shopping portals I am involved with, on top of the click fraud. But it is a pretty big pet peeve!

Thanks,
Grant
www.HeavyGlare.com
Extreme Eyewear for Extreme Sports!

[Webdango]

I'm pretty partial to the shopping portals I've created:

www.iShopHQ.com
www.Webdango.com

[qsilver]

WOW!!! Webdango you have created shopping portals by yourself!!! This is really AMAZING!

I was thinking that only big IT corporation can do that.

I wonder how much time did you spent ot that portals? What was the major challenges?

[cgadmin]

Actually, webdango looks to just be a front end to Overstock more than anything else. That's just an 'affiliate front-end' site, as are all the 'partner' links on the side. Most of it is LinkSynergy or whatever...

-d

[Webdango]

Originally Posted by cgadmin

Actually, webdango looks to just be a front end to Overstock more than anything else....
-d

cgdamin-

You are correct in that Webdango and iShopHQ make their money through affilaite sales. As Overstock is the only affilaite to break out top sellers, my landing pages are exclusively Overstock, but I have data from 37 other stores as well. And yes, the links on teh right are simple affiliate links.

Both Webdango and iShopHQ are more than just single affiliate promotors however. Currently I have datafeeds from 38 stores for over 425,000 products. I've integrated these products into a single database. While neither site is on the scale of a Pricegrabber or MySimon, they are searchable, browsable by category, and show you the availability and pricing of what you're looking from and what store sells it.

The only difference between my sites and a Pricegrabber (besides size, as I already mentioned) is that those sites are so large and have so much traffic that they're able to forge direct vendor relationships. I don't currently have the volume to go right to a merchant and establish a one-to-one relationship. As such, I'm forced to use affilaite management sites such as Linkshare, Commission Junction, etc. One day....

All price comparison sitres are affiliate sites. How do you think they make their money? Someone clicks through and buys and the price comparison site gets a cut.

Your post seems somewhat disparaging. At least that's the way I took it. Webdango and iShopHQ (and the baby HQ aites as well) are much more than simple affiliate sites with affiliate links. I now average 1000+ uniques a day across all my sites. I started Webdango 4 years ago, iShopHQ 5 months ago, and just began builing the BabyHQs at the beginning of October. I won't tell you how much I make, but keep reading....

qsilver - don't let cgadmin get you down or turn you off to affiliate marketing. 90% of affialites never make a dime, but do it right and you can make REAL money. I learned by trial and error over the last 4 years, going from a single site with static affiliate links to 24 dynamic sites using datafeeds from 38 stores with over 425,000 items in my database. The money I make from my sites pays for my car (Ford SportTrac), all my gas, all the computer gear I've ever bought, and my house payment - and I still have a good chunck of money left over every month. I personally know affiliates pulling down more than 10K a month - one guy makes over 25K a month!

I spent a lot of up front time learning and developing. My sites pretty much run themselves. I've built jobs that automatically go out and get the latest datafeed files, download them, unzip them, and refresh the database. If there's an error, it automatically notifies me. My sites run for weeks and weeks without me having to do anything. Once a month, I reboot my IIS and SQL servers, and that's it. A few times a week, I log into my affiliate accounts to see how much I'm making.

If you want to build affilaite sites, using datafeeds is the best option. That said, I know someone who runs a contant based site for Final Fantasy who clears over 6K a month - and she doesn't sell a thing. All advertising.

Learn a web programming language (ASP, PHP, .NET, etc), learn SQL (structured query language), study up on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and read, read, read. There are tons of articles about how to build affiliate sites. Don't EVER pay anything for something that will tell you who to do it. I started hosting with professional hosting companies. Now I do it all myself. You could go that route as well once you start making money.

It's not a get rich quick, or maybe not even a get rich at all. Most affilaites quit and never make anything. But with time and A LOT of effort and by learning from your mistakes, you can generate a healthy second income. I know because I've done it. Email me if you have specific questions.

[qsilver]

Originally Posted by cgadmin

Actually, webdango looks to just be a front end to Overstock more than anything else. That's just an 'affiliate front-end' site, as are all the 'partner' links on the side. Most of it is LinkSynergy or whatever...

-d

Yes it is ... and so what?

What is wrong to be paid when you are providing some kind of service to people?

[brian.mark]

I ruffled some feathers here. Seems that the shopping portals don't like me talking about their shortcomings. I've received email from 3 of them now (or at least an employee in one case). They all claim that I'm off base with the counting each click. However, they do admit that it is per session, not per visitor... so if someone leaves, then comes back later it does indeed count as a second click.

As for the spiders following the link counting, they don't want to address that. They have talked about using spiders to crawl our site, not about spiders crawling their site. When I have tried to ask the other way, they won't or can't respond. Maybe I've hit on something major here that they don't want to think about. At what they charge per click, that could amount to a lot of cash.

In any case, an affiliate site isn't a shopping portal no matter how you slice it. I'm not saying that it is without value, but a shopping portal would allow me to place products on their site without an affiliate program set up. If I can't go there and get my site set up, then it isn't a shopping portal in my book... just comparison shopping affiliate clutter. If you're competing with the people doing the selling, that's not a portal. If you're doing SEO to your site to help out those listed and charge based upon the traffic produced, that's a shopping portal.

Brian.

[maxsun]

Speaking of Pet Peeves!

If anyone is considering advertising on Nextag (PPC) you might want to read about our experience!

Last year we budgeted $50 to spend on Nextag. Not a huge sum--but we pepper our Xmas ad budget around.

This year we came back and put $50 in--but found we only had $47 and 1 click! With all the PPC issues these days--we're watching clicks very closely.

We emailed them twice--no answer. Finally we threatened to dispute the charge. This time they answered, saying "our email server had bounced back their first 2 emails" which is why we never got a reply. No complaints from anyone else--so this is a bit strange, but O.K.

They said on our first deposit last year, they'd continued to charge us clicks after our budgeted $50 ran out. I wanted to know who authorized this? They said it was their "policy" and that "I got what I paid for".

I protested saying even Google will refund your money if they exceed your budget. After a few emails, I got the following reply (verbatim):

"Since your account is quite small and the cost of customer support has already by-several-times exceeded the amount of traffic you have done in the past year, and since you will not be receiving a $2.10 credit since you did place your listings live on the site and did receive traffic for them, my manager has instructed me to deactivate this account. Your positive balance will be refunded to your credit card."

The gist? If you make a deposit with them it looks like they feel entitled to keep on charging you after your deposit is gone. Now maybe this is in the "fine print" somewhere, but I bet all you Webmasters/Advertisers aren't aware of this...

First off--we don't deal with companies who feel "entitled" to spend our ad dollars without our permission.

Secondly, to lose a customer over $2.10? That's sort of inconceivable to us... Yes, we're small, and yes, it's trivial amount--but to lose a repeat client over $2.10? Wow!

We're quite happy to take our Ad dollars elsewhere. Hence, in good will to other potential advertisers out there, we felt you should know about their "policies" and rude customer service.

If you decide to use their PPC you'd better allocate more--they'll feel entitled to spend it. How much more? We don't know. And if you complain? Your account will be deactivated.

[brian.mark]

That is a terrible experience. We've been giving them our couple grand a month for a while now, so I guess they'll help us out a bit more, but I'll keep a watch on it.

I guess this sort of what I'm looking for... obviously customer service is a huge part of the game. Also, sounds like being able to truly specify your ad budget seems like it'll be a bigger deal to the smaller guys, which is who I'm really looking to target. Most of these PPC services make it too complicated for the smaller, less technical websites.

I'll take "Make it simple" for 1000, Alex. ;-)

Brian.

[cyanide]

maxsun
wow, that is a terrible situation. I hate it when poor customer service happens like that.

hmmmm, and I was thinking about signing up with them... will think about that one.

brian.mark
How is your experience with them?
Do you get decent traffic and roi ?

[brian.mark]

cyanide,

We get a decent ROI (20 - 30x spend) from NexTag. Very similar to BizRate and Shopping.com. Highest traffic for our vertical has been from BizRate.com at this point. NexTag and Shopping.com are each about double what we see from Froogle as far as number of sales, but we don't track number of clicks from Froogle to accurately compare conversion rates or traffic.

As for customer support, I've never had to call them. Again, since we don't put a cap on our spending, we don't have to worry about listings falling off, etc. I do have a custom written RIO tracker that is tracking ROI on a per product basis. If we get to a certain spend level without seeing a sale, it automatically removes the product from our feed. Without that, I don't think we'd be seeing the return that we currently do.

I can't say I've had a bad experience with any PPC program, so I'm looking for more all the time. We're going to start using PriceGrabber just as soon as I get a feed done to send them.

Let me know how your experience is with them if you decide to give them a try.

Brian.

[gregmil]

Originally Posted by qsilver

WOW!!! Webdango you have created shopping portals by yourself!!! This is really AMAZING!

I was thinking that only big IT corporation can do that.

I wonder how much time did you spent ot that portals? What was the major challenges?

I am finishing multi-seller Online Portal.
It's not Pay-per-Fake-Click program site.
This is real time shopping protal with multiple services and features.
3 types of Retail Services,
Wholesale Catalog,
Wish List,
Business Directory,
Private Communicator,
Archive,
FreeLance Service.

This is just a list of major services. There is a large list of features. Consolidated product review, inventory control, multiple listing submission, bulk product submission, free and paid (featured) adversiements, dynamic title/description/keywords feeding and many more...
I can create multi-seller Portals with one or any combination of the services above in extremely short time. Portals can have centralized or local data bases.
I invested almost one year of my life into this venture. It was extremely challenging process.
I am looking for serious partners-investors or partners with the large amount of merchandise in stock or both.
If you are ambisious business person, who want to jump on the top position in your industry, please let me know. I hate making empty promises, but in this case I can assure that this system has all potentials to occupy leading possition in virtually any industry.

Multi-Service, Multi-Seller, Multi-Advertiser, Cross-Industry Portal could be lanched in extremely short period of time.
If you wish to get more information please start from description of your products or amount of money immediately available for the investment into the advertising campaign and improvement of the developed SW.
I think about 2 types (levels) of partnership to be proposed to right partner.

Contact me at gm@a-1art.com

[gregmil]

[quote="brian.mark"]I am not talking about a shopping cart or hosting, Zuk. A shopping portal is someone like BizRate.com, Shopping.com, NexTag.com, Froogle.com (free, but still a shopping portal), etc.

Hi!
I think that you slightly narrowed the innitial sense of word "Portal".
Portal is any complex solution, which provides multiple services or multiple vendors. It's even not necessary eCommerce.

Let's narrow this. We are talking about eCommerce Portal. In your case you gathered the product data from multiple sites and you sell clicks or get affiliate compensation. This is you, NexTag, Froogle and other solution. Is it the only solution? I don't think so.

My Portal includes multi-user seller opportunity as well as multiple services under one roof. Were I came? To the same point. I need vendors for almost ready system with multiple retail and advertise services.

Good Luck!