Shopzilla Flop Update And Reprieve?

Hello good people!

Yesterday I talked about my shopzilla flop and how my account had gone to zero with no notification from them at all. I was pretty disappointed.

Since then I’ve gotten quite an update. Apparently my little blog post caught the attention of someone at Shopzilla and they sprung into action in a very surprising way.

First off, yesterday afternoon I got a canned email from them in response to the original email I sent them a few days ago asking if I needed to give them a list of my sites that had shopzilla ads on them. Here’s the email I got:

John,
Under this account, you can publish Shopzilla links on any site you operate, as long as our team gets a chance to look over the website and approves it for use.

There is no need to register new accounts for separate websites. We suggest that you use the “Placement ID” tool for multiple website publishing so you can keep links from each website separate on your earnings report.

You can create Placement IDs here: https://publisher.shopzilla.com/pp/links/placement/index.xhtml Let us know what sites you would like to add or if you have any additional questions.

Thank you,
Shopzilla Publisher Support Team

So at least I got an email from them, though it seemed fairly canned and didn’t really answer my question except the part that said I can put shopzilla ads on as many sites as I want as long as their team gets a chance to look them over and approve them.

But they didn’t tell me HOW to give them a list…so I just responded to that email with a list of 1,065 url’s for different websites that I own.

Then a few minutes later I got an email from an actual account manager who cleared everything up and also told me that I should be using a specific new widget on my sites because they’re fazing out the old “dynamic assets” that I currently use.

Granted, the new widget looks MUCH better than the old dynamic assets, but I would have liked to have known about the new widget before I deployed the old dynamic assets across several hundred of my web sites. But whatever.

As long as I had the ear of an account manager, I asked about my stats going to zero yesterday. She said that the reporting system is backlogged and it will update within the next couple of days… ok.

Next I got an email from the Chief Marketing Officer of Shopzilla (and he also posted a comment on yesterday’s blog post). Talk about interesting. I’m impressed. He apologized for my problems, addressed my concerns, and asked if there was anything he could do.

So In light of all that, I’m retracting my vitriolic rant from yesterday and replacing it with a “let’s wait and see how things go”.

If nothing else, the support team at Shopzilla has certainly impressed me. It’s not often that you get that sort of response. Their ads may or may not convert into an income stream to rival adsense or amazon affiliate ads, but at least I know that they aren’t trying to screw me over – and that’s something in this day and age!

Granted I had to write a nasty blog post before I got their attention…but I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on that one. Maybe it just takes them a while to reply to email.

Regardless, after looking at their new widget and hearing what they had to say…I’m willing to give them a second chance. Now it’s just up to the numbers.

This morning, my shopzilla reports DID update just like they said they would. Here’s how the numbers shake out for the last week:

Take a look at the last two days… 5,953 impressions and zero earnings and 5,546 impressions, 2 clicks, and a whopping $.17 cents in earnings. Those numbers are disgraceful.

I’m going to do a couple of things going forward. First I’m going to keep an eye on the stats for a few more days and see how things go. If they continue to show such horrible earnings, I’m going to swap out the old ads and replace them with the new widget that Shopzilla has suggested I use.

That’s going to take a lot of work but it might be worth it. Then I’m going to watch and see if the results are any better. I don’t have high hopes, but we’ll see.

Keep on building!

-John Elder
The Marketing Fool!

John Elder is an Entrepreneur, Web Developer, and Writer with over 27 years experience creating & running some of the most interesting websites on the Internet. Contact him here.

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