Can Shopping.com really not figure this out?
It’s been a while since I wrote a post about comparison engines but I can’t believe the issue that we’ve had with Shopping.com recently. In our industry (computer hardware and accessories) it is not very uncommon for two different products to have the same MPN (manufacturer part number). For instance, two manufacturer’s may use the part number 200A for two products that are entirely different.Normally this wouldn’t cause any problems - you’re not likely to accidentally buy a garden hose instead of a computer cable because the two manufacturers have the same part number. Even if both products were similar you would most likely check the manufacturer/brand first, right?Apparently Shopping.com, however, has no way to handle this. We provide a feed of all of our products periodically to SDC which includes our product description, part number, manufacturer, etc. As far as I can tell, however, their engine only considers the part numbers we provide and the price. For example, we have a Norco 4U Steel Rackmount Chassis with the part number DS-600s. Unfortunately this also happens to be a part number for a Compaq laptop, so when people searching for this part number on Shopping.com see that we have the laptop for $260 they obviously want to find out if the deal is legit (see the search in action here).Keep in mind that we have never sold this laptop or fed this product description to Shopping.com - they just noticed in our feed that we were using that part number and have been driving us unqualified (no conversion) traffic ever since. Our traffic coordinator (aka The ATC) has been working with them to fix the problem - I’ll let you know what they suggest we do in these situations.As a side-note, if you’re interested in learning more about comparison shopping engines I strongly recommend you check out Brian’s blog at ComparisonEngines.com. Brian, if you read this have you seen this issue before and do you have any suggestions for us?
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