Amazon as a CSE

Alright let's get back at it with the Comparison Shopping Engines. The first Tier 1 Shopping Engine listed in the CSE Relationship Chart from my last post was Amazon.com with the child site of BrowseGoods.com. BroweGoods is a visual shopping aid and eventually links directly to Amazon.com for the final sale. Amazon also has associates (affiliates) that help move their product and your product if you have it listed with them. However, as far as them being a Comparison Shopping Engine I don't think I would classify them as that since for a lot of products, especially shoes and apparel, no actual comparisons are made. For the products that do have comparisons they are less obvious than most CSE's and one click deeper. I think Amazon.com would be better classified as an affiliate. As a merchant you can put your products on Amazon.com but there is little to no competition like on other CSE's. Amazon will just display the product and price with a note that the order will be filled by Merchant X, and to compare you have to dig deeper with the link to the right "More Buying Choices." I don't have any personal experience with Amazon because when I came to work for my current employer they had already ceased the relationship with Amazon due to too many technical issues with data feeds and implementation. However I would assume that most of the time the rewards for having your product on Amazon would be worth the implementation and data feed hassles due to the sheer ammount of traffic that they drive. If your business aligns with Amazon's core market of books, movies, music and games it would most likely be a strong partnership. The partnership would also benifit from Amazon's other web properties such as IMDB.com and CDnow.com which should get your products even more exposure. To list your products on Amazon you use the Amazon Marketplace. Next time I will cover Google Product Search and Shopzilla.