Lengow’s Feed-Management Tool allows e-merchants to quickly and easily index their products catalogue on any e-commerce channels in the world : shopbots, marketplaces… As a matter of fact, once our clients’ product feeds are sent through these channels, they just have to optimize the feed daily in order to keep it up to date and improve their products’ SEO.

Marketplaces and Shopbot are the most commonly used e-commerce channels but have a completely different business model.

Some useful reminders:

The source feed is the file which links the merchant’s catalogue to the channels’ database. The feed includes all the required information related to the product sold : name, description, size, color, price, delivery, shipping costs, etc.

Shopbots provide customers with a list of classified offers sorted by ascending prices.  If a visitor clicks on one of the offers on the list he will be redirected to the merchant’s website. With shopbots, the transaction is processed on the merchant’s website. E-retailers pay shopbots on a CPC-basis which means that every time someone clicks on its offer the merchant will pay the shopbot a small commission for bringing in a visitor on its website. The commission depends on the product category and can vary from 0.10 up to 0.50 cts per click.

Note: although some shopbot will take a percentage on the final amount of the sale there are very few shopbots that still work that way.

Marketplaces provide visitors with a list of offers from multiple sellers. As opposed to shopbots, marketplaces take care of the entire buying experience. Thus, visitors are never redirected to the merchant’s website. As a result, marketplaces make money based on their third-party sellers’ performance (CPA) by charging a percentage (usually from 8 to 15%) of the final amount of the sale.

As a matter of fact, marketplaces’ commission rates can be more expensive than shopbots’s CPC ; however marketplaces offers a no-sale no-fee basis where sales are guaranteed. Whereas with shopbots, you will pay a few cents/click to attract new visitors on your website that you will still have to convert into clients. This traffic acquisition technique is much more random and can be even more expensive in the long run if your conversion rate is too low. Remember: take a moment to think about it before!

e.g. If your conversion rate reaches 2% (that means for 100 visitors on your website only 2 of them will actually buy something) your customer acquisition cost (called CAC) will be 50 times your cost per click (CPC) because on average,  you need to acquire 50 visitors to sell once.

Carefully optimizing your product feed is highly recommended for any e-commerce channels you choose.

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