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Shopping Mall Listing for Your Small Shop?
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Promoting and marketing any product online may ultimately lead you to some type
of online shopping mall or comparison shopping directory where you can get your web site listed for shoppers to
find. Are these online
malls worth it? We will review this for you, from our experiences, what we have found in our monumental
efforts to promote our own online shopping web site and what we have found actually does help.
Online sales are up around 30% over 2006 sales for most e-retailers. Why? Because it's faster,
easier to compare pricing, more convenient and there are more deals on the web. Additionally, the
average item to be purchased online 6 years ago was a book or coffee mug. Today people are purchasing
furniture, computers and big televisions, many more high-ticket items.
The problem for the small business web site is unless you are Sears, REI or George Foreman with
a name brand product, you will have to get creative and aggressive with marketing in order to
sell anything.
Try searching for "online shopping", or a similar term, in a search engine. Some
of the top sites that come up will be online shopping malls. Many of these malls will be strictly affiliate driven web
sites that only list those big name brands or products for a piece of the revenue generated from a sale.
If your product is already popular and well recognized setting up your own affiliate program and joining
this type of mall could work perfectly for you. If not, then you will be looking for those malls that
will list your product or web site for free or for a small fee and no per sale percentage.
A pay for listing online shopping mall is great for the small business person trying to bring quality
targeted shoppers to their small shop web site. Not all of these malls are created equally or even
receive enough traffic to make their fees worthwhile. Many of these malls also have confusing navigation,
are placed into a bad frame set or list so many pages of shops that if your shop name starts with a "W"
you may end up on page 20 of apparel.
Now for some reviews:
www.shopmillionpixels.com
is a combination of affiliate
and small shop listings on a few main pages. There is not an overwhelming number of listings but the concept
of purchasing pixel space has been done and this is really just buy a small banner space. When you go to
check the price it seams a little confusing also. Another thing to look for is how popular these malls are. Review
them on Google tool bar or Alexia rating websites before joining.
www.toponlineshopping.com is a
very good combination of good navigation, well-organized
listings and category choices. A listing on this web site includes your web site is free for a link or
an upgrade for no link back. A good site and good
value for what looks like it could be a good amount of traffic.
Here are some things to consider when looking at a place to list your online shop. Be sure
to find out
the mall's pricing / billing plan, how fast your listing will be posted, your ability to update your
listing, how easy it will be for a shopper to find your listing in the mall and how much traffic the
mall gets on a daily or monthly basis.
As you can see there are many things to look at when it comes to getting a good online shopping
mall listing. Such a listing can be very beneficial by targeting the online shoppers you're looking
for. By placing your link on a popular mall site with a high page ranking it will bring more traffic to
your site from some search engines.
Using an online shopping mall as an advertising method is a great way of targeting people looking to
purchase products online. Online malls can also be good for increasing your web sites link popularity
while giving your product cost effective exposure to shoppers looking to buy.
For more information check these out:
First Stop Shops Online Shopping Mall
our very own online shopping mall created from the above research.
Online Advertising at About.com.
Yahoo Virtual Mall listings.
All Business small business resources.
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regarding rights and restrictions.
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