An online shopping portal is a great tool for driving quality traffic to an online store. Here are three reasons why online shopping portals work well for small businesses.

For an established small business, the task of selling and marketing products on the Internet can be daunting. There are thousands of companies out there offering to drive huge amounts of traffic to your online store. However, the cost for these services can sometimes be astronomical. For the do-it-yourselfers, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising (Google Adwords, Yahoo Sponsored Search, etc.) is often the first step. While optimizing your web site to appear in the “free” listing can take months, PPC can put a web site on the first page of search results very quickly. However, this quickness often carries a hefty price tag.

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An alternative to PPC advertising is the use of Shopping Portals. Some of the better known paid options here include Shopzilla, PriceGrabber, Nextag, and Shopping.com. There are also free options like Google Base. Below, I have listed three reasons why online shopping portals work great for the small business owner.

  1. They Advertise For You

    These shopping portals actually advertise in PPC listings like Google Adwords. If you do a search for a typical product, it is very likely that you will find sites like Nextag or Shopzilla in the “sponsored” listings. While the small business owner may still want to devote some funds to PPC advertising, the fact that shopping portals handle it for advertisers makes things much easier.

  2. Higher Quality Traffic

    Shopping portals still charge per click in most cases (SortPrice being one exception); however, the “clicker” who comes to your site through a shopping portal will in many cases be much more likely to buy than the “clicker” coming from a search engine. Shopping portals typically have specific pages for products with a picture and description. They then list the merchants using their service with the price and shipping cost for each merchant. The merchant is only charged if the potential customer clicks through to their online store. It should be obvious that this “clicker” has much more information and is much more likely to by when he makes that paid click than the “clicker” from the PPC search engine.

  3. Buyers Like Them

    Who wants to spend all day sorting through all the search results on Google to compare prices on various products? Shopping portals allow potential buyers to find a product and then quickly see a number of merchants selling this product. The potential buyer is able to see the merchant’s rating and reviews in addition to price and shipping cost. Few people will spend hours trying to save one more dollar when they have such information readily available.