Shopping.com Introduces Value-Based Pricing - What This Means for Partners
By the time I had checked my feed reader this morning, Brian Smith had already covered Shopping.com’s latest press release. If you are a reader of Brian’s blog then you know he has been very critical of Shopping.com the past couple years. So I was sure I was dreaming when I read his post title “Shopping.com Gets With The Program.” Alas, I was not dreaming… They are planning to release the following quality innovations for merchants:
- Product Performance Reporting
- SKU Level Bidding
- Shopping.com Cart
- Distributed Commerce Program
These will be accesible through a merchant portion of the Shopping.com API, slated for beta release in 2008. You can read the details about the items mentioned above in the press release or on Ed’s etaildtail blog entry.
Now, what does this mean to a Partner in the Shopping.com Developer Network? Simply put conversion will effect your CPC rate. Directly from Shopping.com:
“the revenue per click to publishers will also be adjusted based on the merchant CPC. We evaluate the quality of traffic from our distribution partners by measuring the conversion to sale and adjust the merchants’ cost per click accordingly.”
More…
- All existing agreements to remain the same
- To continue to receive a share of the merchant revenue
- To be evaluated based on a new metric: Quality Score. This metric will determine the value a partner receives on each click and will be available in the Partner Account Center upon launch of VBP.
I’m hoping that Shopping.com will ensure publisher partners have the information neccessary to increase their conversion and provide a higher quality of clicks.
This will change the landscape dramatically, especially for those pumping low quality clicks through SDC. But at the end of the day, its all for the better. From Shopping.com:
“Value-Based Pricing will encourage merchants to increase their investment with Shopping.com, driving a mutually beneficial relationship between partners and merchants and reinforcing our ecosystem.”
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