Online Retailers Need to Be 'Froogle'

Google's fast and slick online price comparison site, Froogle, can help small and start-up online retailers get noticed, and this effective new service is free.

Perhaps one of the greatest challenges that small online retailers face is just how to bring potential customers to their tiny bit of the World Wide Web. To put this problem in context, imagine that you owned a small closet sized boutique in a shopping center that had more than 5 million stores. How would you get noticed? How would you attract customers?

Well, for retailers who are not afraid to have their prices compared with every other store that sells a particular product, Froogle (http://froogle.google.com) is a great way to build traffic, get customers, and, frankly, it is a must in every marketers tool box.

First, the price, free, makes this a given. Unlike other shopping and price comparison web sites (www.shopping.com would be an example of a very expensive service) a retailer can list as many products as they want without having to open a spending account, paying per click; paying per impression; or pering anything else, or even submitting a credit card. Froogle is completely free for retailers, at least for now.

Froogle also has the power of Google behind it. There is a link to the service right on the Google home page, and the service has Google's lightning quick responsiveness.

Retailers also have a lot of control over how their products appear on Froogle and how often those products are up dated since the listing is created with a simple spreadsheet which the retailer can update just about every day if they were so inclined.

As with everything in life there are some things to keep in mind with Froogle. Froogle will not accept any affiliate marketing, you must be a real retailer. Froogle will not accept any multi-level marketing or pyramid scheme companies. Nor will the service allow any other comparison shopping service or mirror sites.

Once a retailer is listed on Froogle, they will want to manipulate their listing and may find they even want to make a change or two to their landing pages. Online retailers that do not have a lot of experience with shopping services would be well advised to hire a media consultant, and should expect to pay about $200 for help setting up Froogle listings of up to about 200 products.

Froogle is not the perfect balm for an online retailers web traffic problems, but it is well worth the effort to get listed.