The shipping cost field - good or bad?
In my last post, we talked about the importance of product level bidding on CSEs that offer it. Today I’d like to look at the shipping cost field that nearly all shopping engines provide. While I typically like to preach about including as much information in your data feed as possible, the shipping cost field can be an exception depending on the shopping engine.
For example, Shopping.com adds the price of shipping from the data feed into the price of the product in their product listings.
Listing in Shopping.com - Price of item w/ Shipping cost ($94.96)
Listing on site - Price of item w/out Shipping cost ($89.97)
Shopping.com’s willingness to show the shipping cost plus the cost of the product in their product search results can have a negative effect on your traffic from the engine. Think about it, if two companies are offering the same product at the same price point but one is showing the shipping cost in addition to the product’s price, which merchant do you think will get the click? I’d put my money on the merchant with the lower price showing.
Try removing the data in the shipping cost field for the Shopping.com feed and see what it does. There may be a positive change in clicks and conversions. Please note that not every shopping comparison engine uses the shipping cost the same way Shopping.com does, so please make sure to know how each engine uses each piece of data.