Shopzilla is a price comparison service owned and operated by Scripps Networks Interactive. They are a leading comparison shopping service that also operates BizRate.com and the BizRate consumer feedback network. Scripps Networks Interactive boasts Shopzilla carries over 65,000 merchants. Shopzilla has portals available in the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany. To advertise in each, you must register with each. The pricing model is a standard Cost Per Click (CPC) model attached to a bid system. The higher your bid on your items, the more prominently the listing will appear within their category. Search options still rely heavily on relevancy to keywords. Listings do carry a minimum bid requirement which is determined by category and time of the year. Shopzilla raises their minimum bid amounts during the holiday season.
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Sign Up
Visit http://merchant.shopzilla.com/oa/registration/index.xpml
Shopzilla has a five step process to creating an account.
You must decide which of the four Shopzilla site’s you would like to have your products listed on. Through this process, you will need to provide:
- Business information
- Website information
- Shipping of orders information
- Accepted payment types (Visa/MC, Purchase Orders, Paypal, Google Checkout, etc.)
- Special Features of your site (online order tracking, live customer representative, secure checkout)
Category Information
As part of your initial product data feed, Shopzilla asks that all of your products be categorized into their taxonomy system. You cannot, however, have access to the official help sheet of categories until you have finished your set up and paid your initial deposit. To get around that, you can visit their category guide at http://www.shopzilla.com/category-guide.
Going Live on Shopzilla
You will need to create a data feed that is formatted to Shopzilla’s specifications. If you already have a data feed for another comparison shopping engine, you may be able to reformat that one.
If you are going to create the feed on your own, you should use a spreadsheet program, such as Microsoft Excel. You will need to save the file in a text, tab-delimited format and it is best and easiest to seek out a template of the Shopzilla feed to use as an example. Click Here for a usable template. Once you have created the file to their specifications, you will be ready to upload Log in to your Shopzilla merchant account and select the Manage Listings tab.
You will want to then select the Submit & Update You Product Listings Datafeed link. This will take you to a page where you will have several choices on how you want to upload your products. Read through the options and choose the best for your situation. We will deal with the most common for this instructional, which is the Programmatic Upload through FTP method. This leads to a five step process, of which, it will seem to you that you have already done.
Step 1: Create a Product Feed – Click Download Feed Specs (required)
Step 2: Establish a Delivery Location – Click Create delivery location for me
Delivery Location Details – SAVE THIS INFORMATION, AS YOU WILL NEED THIS ELSEWHERE. Create a filename. Note that the filename you create will remain the data feed file name for Shopzilla, as you cannot change this. An example of this filename could be: shopzillafeed.txt or shopzillaproducts.csv.
At this time, you will want to use the FTP information you have for your Shopzilla account and upload your feed, which should be named the same name you used in Step 2, using your own FTP program.
Once you have done this, return to your account in Shopzilla and in Step 2, locate and click Check Status. Should there be any mistakes or issues in the ftp upload, it will be reflected here. If there are no errors, proceed to Step 3: Upload your feed to the location. Here, you will simply click DONE, next to Click once you have uploaded your feed. Then proceed to Step 4: Check for Errors. Click Check Feed and then review the errors and fix them if necessary.
When the feed is free of errors, click the back button and go to Step 5: Begin Processing Feed. Click Process. If you have not already done so, you will then be prompted to make a payment. Once all of that is done, your product listings will go live.
Important Links
Shopzilla Category guide
http://www.shopzilla.com/category-guide
Shopzilla Rate Card
https://merchant.shopzilla.com/oa/resources/us/updated_rate_card.pdf
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