Need some feedback
Once again, we've made lots of changes at ToolBarn. But now, I'm looking for some feedback.
We've got a cache on our local servers of what most of the competing sites are priced at on every product we offer. If we show that, similar to Progressive Auto Insurance, are we asking for trouble?
Two thoughts on why we should:
1) Establish ourselves as a destination.
2) Give our customers less reason to leave our site and look around.
Two thoughts on why we should not:
1) We may not always have the lowest price.
2) We've got more traffic than most of these sites, so we'd be building their brand for them.
Such a tough choice. We'll probably run an experiment at some point and see what it does. What do you think?
Comments
1. Progressive shows people their competitors prices... even if Progressive isn't the lowest. It helps to be trust with the users.
2. Maybe instead of showing it like that (where bots can get at it), you could offer it as a "sign up and give us your email and we'll email you the price comparisons for the products you've selected". That way you're not benefiting your competitors as much and you're capturing email addresses for lists.
:)
Maybe as a compromise, I could require people be signed in via their account (we're adding that here shortly) in order to view that information.
As the 800lb Gorilla, when you make a move like this, your setting a standard or breaking new ground.
I like the idea, however, I definitely feel you will loose a few sales on the products you show that are cheaper.
However, as a marketing move, this builds an amount of trust from the customer that you can't buy. Instead of searching on Google for power tools, they will be searching on toolbarn. Neat huh?
However, why don't just filter out the products that are lower in price.
I'd say if we do a test, it'd be good to try it both ways and see what the difference is. It just makes me nervous considering a change this big. I keep doubting if I should even try it out or not, which is why I'm looking for some validation.
Another thing you could do, is if your price is higher, show similar lower priced items along with competitor's prices.
Though as you said, you'll never know unless you test it.
Also, we're not scraping our competitor's sites. We're using a free data source, so it doesn't hit their servers at all.