Arthur Freydin’s Blog

Online marketing, gadgets, business, and thoughts.

So your online retail business has survived by advertising on Pricegrabber for 4 years? Sure you advertise on other shopping engines, and maybe you dabble a bit in SEM, but you’re not afraid to say that over 80% of your business comes straight from Pricegrabber. Now what happens when Pricegrabber reporting stops working or your feed breaks? Can you go even one day of no sales with nothing to fall back on?

It’s situations like these that just make me cringe. Sure, a business may start out a bit short-sighted, but there comes a time in its life cycle when you have to begin building disaster scenarios. Once you start planning for the scenario, it becomes painfully obvious just how quickly your empire can crumble. Can you afford to lose 80% or more of your sales? What would you do?

Invest in the future. As difficult as it may be, consider for a moment that you don’t have Pricegrabber, what are you left with? There are tons of various marketing channels out there just begging to be played with. You have affiliate marketing, search engine optimization (typically a very hard sell but oh so worth it), and paid search just to name a few. Each one of these channels has the capability of driving at least 20% of your business at a great ROI.

Breaking out of a tried and true marketing channel may be as difficult as tossing aside your security blanket but oh is it worth it. Five years down the road, when you’ve noticed your competition slowly beginning to disregard that security blanket, you’ll begin to wonder where they’ve gone and why they left.