The Best Type of Risk!

I thought there was a catch. I was told I could import my product feed or list product ads individually. They claim no PPC (Pay-Per-Click) I got even more sceptical. But I thought if there was a chance their claim was true that I could advertise all my products for free its worth a phone call and email. I thought let me get it in writing and if BrowSearch & Feedonomy would put it in writing then the offer is too good to pass. I was surprised but in hindsight I understand. They are building what is called a shopping engine. Its basically a search engine but instead of crawling, and s****ing and indexing all content they specialize in consumer products, B2C, B2B anything product and service that can be purchased and sold or rented. That means they can provide a much more comprehensive shopping or search engine for shopping and leave out all the questions and answers, scientific papers and all that stuff other search engines index day and night instead they can spend all their time finding every possible online and trading, property sales, rentals, everything that is related to ecommerce. For consumers shopping its fantastic. The other benefit for shoppers or consumers is their search results are not manipulated like with Google or Bing. For example if you looking for a product say iPhone Google wont give you Android but if you Search: iPhone 10 new black. Instead of Google providing search results of all relevant options model: 10 colour: Black etc. They may be matching ads but lets say there are 10 ads Google will only show say 3 the rest of these results will be iPhone 11 or 8 any colour. What I am trying to explain is every seller has to pay and complete with every other seller on every product or listing. They make sellers basically gamble and the ad with the highest advertising budget even if there is an exact match the iPhone with the highest or the seller who is paying the most PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ads will be shown. But if you think about it over time this increase in advertising costs means the product every product and service will have to increase their prices by at least 15-20% as that is the least amount you can spend. But to remain competitive as its not simple like it once was choosing between a few options. Its getting more complex I am sure its part of Google plan to get market share. As soon as you get an agency to help manage your campaign, product feed and advertising campaign the cost lets say you have 100 products it works out to about 10-15% of total revenue. I am not repeating myself here is the thing. If you manage your advertising yourself you could maybe survive spending 10% but when you have other business spending up to 25-35% of total revenue on advertising. Plus an extra 10% -15% for an ad agency to run your campaign or to help you run it you can add even if we say 10% that is already 25% going to advertising. Some companies are also using Product Feed Managers plus agency plus the cost of the ads. If you get away with paying 25% of revenue to wards advertising you doing OK. My point or one of them is you may get away with not raising prices in the short term but these extra monthly costs catch up and you have to increase sale prices accordingly. Basically when you search on Google or Microsoft Ads if they favour those listings with the highest ad budget is logical that the buyer is going to get results with all the most expensive sellers. Logical. I tried Google Free Listings I may have gotten one click during the month until I realized everyone is listing free those not using paid advertising. Billions of websites and sellers. There is no real benefit if everyone is doing it. Then I realized the reason why they offer free listings. Google are smart people think of Android etc. They are years ahead generally speaking. I realized the free listings is just about market share as humans most of us are lazy relatively speaking. What I mean is if you have already spent time loading you product ads on Google its not that complex or complicated but once you used to the merchant centre and how you place ads when you do decide to try or start a paid campaign unless something weird or you account is blocked I don't know about you but once I was set up with Google Ads (Free) Once I was fami**** with the layout it would be a time waster to move everything to Microsoft as I suggested unless something went wrong etc. The only reason they offer free listings is market share as over 90% of advertisers will remain with Google when starting a paid campaign. I also realized out of disappointment my free listings over 100 products did so badly. Then I realized besides the fact the supply is tiny I mean those offering ad networks or search & shopping engines can be counted on one hand that is globally. But advertisers, merchants, sellers are in the billions and growing. What I am saying is their business is booming but even if Google could program their system to show your free listings more often they will not. Besides as mentioned the number of paid listing are huge lets pretend it was not as busy the reason they will not let your free listing be shown (Except for the 1st 2-3 months) That is the best you will get and then suddenly gets even worse and remains like that. Not just because they are so busy with paid listings but if they results remained not even fantastic I am talking even fair to average that means you getting a few extra hits for free so even if you get a fair to low response from the free listings no one would go for a paid campaign! Seriously as why pay an extra 15-20% every month if you already getting a fair response. You think now you would rather pay and get a few extra hits but I have tried it and have spoken to others and we concluded in reality if we receiving even a below average response I am not going to spend the time and money for a slightly better response knowing what its like competing against the Walmart's of tis world. I would be happy and maybe spend one third on another site because then I would be getting the same response and I am saving around 20% of monthly turnover. A lot of money. That is the reason you get a few responses when you first list free ads but then like clockwork it halves and halved again as even if they had no other advertisers if they let your free ads produce results they is no way you going to commit to a paid campaign and everything that comes with it. The agency ,feed management etc. I honestly think small to medium online sellers cannot rely or make the search engine/advertising network your primary marketing strategy. Sure it can work well and used to be much better but it is risky and maybe no in the short term but in months/years the cost of ads will keep going up they have a monopoly on digital ads. Google already controls the Digital Advertising Organization that is supposed to police those in the industry. As I said these guys are years ahead. I am not making this up its called DAL or DA something and that is not all they have also founded other organizations that we may only realize is required in a few years they have already created it. Imagine such a huge high tech company Google not a start-up where high risk is generally how it works venture capital etc. By the time you Google size and age most companies including Google had investments spread around I don't mean growing tomatoes or farming still in tech but AI machine learning maybe those 2 are the same. VR AR maybe cables under the sea etc. Look what they have done. They have basically gotten out of most other industries I read this and not the first time that out of Google $300B+ revenue I think since 1-3 years ago over 85% that means more like 90% of their entire revenue for an company that size its very risky unless they are confident enough believe the DA industry is still growing, that they control the organizations meant to control them and report them when they may be monopolistic and many other activities I believe they are currently its possible I cannot say they guilty as no judge has said same etc. But still. The law usually takes 5-10 years to catch-up. If they are confident enough to take such a risk I think their control and profitability the reward they envision must be great. Sorry I got side-tracked. I was talking about the shopping engine, BrowSearch, 'Browse & Search' & Feedonomy the product feed management company. In a nutshell their offer of free listing was given in writing I thought fantastic what an opportunity but so that side of its is fantastic. I also realized its new so is it worth wasting time listing products if a) They may fail in 6 months. b) If they succeed it will suddenly take off just a matter of getting enough listings ,but they also s****ing, that is getting content that owners may not want you to have, web crawling only gets what publishers what you to get. Jokes aside. Its actually called a Meta-Shopping Engine that simple means Beyond the classical or normal search engine. If you take any of the big engines they source content from one place. It can be crawling but a meta-search means they get their content from multiple sources. It can be crawling, s****ing, Google, and one or 2 other sources only makes for better results. Plus ecommerce we get to upload product feeds and get free ads we get to save 15-35% every month there are no t&c except one. Each listing requires a URL or link just like Google Ads they advertise promote but all sales are on the advertisers or sellers website. That is it. I was speaking about risk. It literally takes a minute to create an account you can also import your entire product feed as long as its a csv file. Just like Google Ads or Bing. Even if you don't actively use it but I an using it. Simply the risk is basically zero no costs it may take 1-2 hours to get the feed working 100$ or adding products manually. But besides the few sales I have already gotten its worth it even if I get one sale a month as I see it as a simple risk reward. No risk maybe it takes a few minutes to add a new product it provides much more you can also promote your company and brand but in the worst case scenario in 5 months bankrupt so what I spent maybe 20 minutes and I will probably get another few sales in 5 months and it does not cost 1 cent. On the other hand if it takes off in a few months new users I don't know for certain I never asked but unless they stupid they will start charging it may be less than Google but the few minutes it take to register now means free advertising and it will become the primary channel I mentioned earlier. That is my strategy what is yours?