NeedPlumbingSupplies.com stops the profit leak with flat-price listings
NeedPlumbingSupplies.com lists products on a number of comparison shopping sites, in most cases paying a fee each time someone clicks on an item, says Jeff Diamond, president of the online retailer. But Diamond says he much prefers the pricing model of Sortprice.com, which charges a flat monthly fee.
“We pay a flat fee based on the number of listings we have with them and people can click all day,” Diamond says. “Apparently, it’s working for them, and I know it works for us.” He says his conversion rate on clicks from Sortprice.com is roughly 5% to 10%, and that the ROI on his spending at Sortprice.com is about double that of other comparison shopping sites.
Diamond started out by taking advantage of Sortprice.com’s free offer for a limited number of listings two and a half years ago. For about the past 18 months, he’s paid to list his entire catalogue. He would not say how much he is paying, but says it is below Sortprice.com’s listed rates, which start at $150 per month for up to 1,000 product listings.
Diamond says he does not know what percentage of the clicks he gets from other sites are fraudulent, such as from competitors trying to drain his marketing budget or site owners trying to drive up their revenue. “But we’re starting an internal process to get a handle on that,” he says. “We’re pretty confident an increasingly meaningful proportion of the clicks are not driving traffic that is at all intent on making a purchase.”
Besides not having to worry about click fraud, the flat-price model means retailers can spend less time managing their marketing campaigns, says Doron Simovitch, CEO and co-founder of Sortprice.com. Many retailers stop their marketing campaigns at night when no one is available to take calls, then restart them in the morning, which is not necessary when they pay a set price per month, he says. Nor do they have to worry about refilling the funds in their pay-per-click accounts.
Sortprice.com went live in 2004 and now has 4,000 merchants live on the site, Simovitch says. He says nearly 80% of merchants renew their contracts.
Sortprice.com was ranked 21st in a listing of comparison shopping sites in August by web measurement firm comScore Inc., which ranked sites by unique visitors.
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