Tradedoubler MyShop – Useful Tool or Posh Search Box?

Mar 13, 2008 by Jason Dale    3 Comments    Posted under: Affiliate Marketing

Tradedoubler have launched a new tool for publishers and advertisers called MyShop. It’s a product search tool which allows an affiliate to place a search box on their site so that users can then search 2.2 million products that reside in the Tradedoubler product feed system. You can also deeplink to search results and products too… the big question though is is it any good? Is it a useful tool or just a posh search box?

Here’s the box in action!

There’s a choice of two colours (charcoal and green) plus various search box sizes.

These are, at best ok, but perhaps could have incorporated a dropdown list of available merchants, shopping categories or even price ranges?

Search speed varies from good to takes all week – mainly ok though, but are the results good? A search for iPod shows the cheapest products first and perhaps surprisingly doesn’t have Apple Stores at the top. You can toggle results by ‘price’ but relevancy does seem to be excluded from the search. A user is probably not going to cycle through pages to find the right product either – especially when the page system is tucked away right at the bottom of the page.

The page could be improved by showing the stores who offer iPods – and the search most certainly needs some relevancy elements included.

If we try iPod Nano there’s more success, but iPod Nano tubes surely aren’t as relevant as an iPod Nano player? Again the problem is relevancy!

Individual pages are at best bland. Here’s our iPod Nano Tubes. This page could be dramatically improved with options for similar products – as is it’s not that impressive.

It’s all a step in the right direction for Tradedoubler, but it lacks that X-Factor in so many places. Perhaps things like being able to brand MyShop with your own logo will come in time but it’s difficult to see, at this stage, how and why any affiliate would think linking to the search results is a better option than creating their own content.

Linking to poor relevancy search results isn’t going to improve conversions and linking to a one product page is just an additional click for the shopper.

So is there anything good to say?

Well it’s a quick and easy way to find products and images to use on blogs and in content – and I’m sure in time it will develop, perhaps onto the same level as Affiliate Window’s ShopWindow. For me, having worked with TD feeds for a considerable time on Shop Loquax, it may signal the start of TD getting feeds into a uniform and manageable state.

At least now they’ll be experiencing the same frustrations affiliates have had with regards to the feeds and how to work with them!

If they’re going to improve on MyShop then that should mean improvements on feed quality – not only for affiliates who take on MyShop but for those who utilise the feeds for price comparison etc. That can only be good news for everyone.

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