What you should know about marketing on Ceneo

Ceneo is a website that combines the features of a price comparison engine and a marketplace. The portal currently offers products from over 18,000 online stores, which publish up to 30 million offers. Competition is fierce due to the popularity of the portal - up to 23 million users per month search for products from a variety of categories.

Many e-commerce platforms offer tools for automatic integration with this portal. The central point of such integration is product feed - a properly prepared XML file that contains information about the products available in store.

How Ceneo works

Ceneo combines two services that may be attractive from the perspective of an online store:

• Price comparison website - it is a portal that allows you to quickly review and compare the offers from many stores and choose the most attractive one. Most often, the price of the product is the decisive criteria on such a website.
• Marketplace - like a price comparison engine, a marketplace aggregates offers from many stores. However, unlike the comparison engine, it does not redirect the user to the offer page, and allows you to build a shopping cart in one place and pay for it in full instead of completing products in many stores. This option is available thanks to the "buy now" button.

Ceneo charges its B2B clients on two different basis: CPC in the case of a comparison engine or a commission for sale (CPS) in the "buy now" option.

What products are worth selling on Ceneo

If the store does not decide on additional promotion options available on Ceneo, the offers will be sorted by price - the basic functionality of the portal is to make it easier for customers to find the cheapest offer.

In practice, this means that it is best to advertise popular, repetitive and not very unique products on the portal, such as household appliances, consumer electronics or cosmetics of popular brands - in this case, customers have specific expectations and know very well what they want to buy.

At the same time, if a product is non-typical or even unique, and its value is determined by features that are difficult to display at first glance, Ceneo is probably not a good place for a new client acquisition. The comparison engine puts emphasis on such aspects as quick availability or low price, and not on the unique features of a given product.

How to sell on Ceneo

The first and most important step to start selling on Ceneo is to integrate the store with the portal. For this purpose, it is necessary to prepare an appropriate product file. In the case of Ceneo, the mandatory fields are:

• ID - product ID
• PRICE - price
• URL - link to the product in the store
• ATTRIBUTES - include the manufacturer's name, manufacturer's code and EAN code

As part of additional information, the store may provide data such as the number of available items of the product, its weight or description. It is also possible to add photos, but their replacement is now done manually by the team working for Ceneo.

However, the technical specification is one thing, and the effective operation within the sales channel is another. In order to be successful in this portal, the store should also pay attention to other issues.

More than just a price

The basic selection criteria is low price - a portal was created for this purpose. However, even the lowest price combined with an unreliable offer will not be effective. To enhance the attractiveness of its offer, the company should add elements such as:

• Product photos - if possible, it is worth reaching for your own distinctive graphic materials. If this is not possible, there are photos offered by the producers - usually of high quality and visually attractive.
• Descriptions - this is the element that the company can distinguish in the cheapest and most effective way. A well-prepared product description will allow you to maximize conversion without additional, long-term costs
• Additional materials - information about the number of items remaining in the warehouse or the expected delivery time is another element that will convince the user to this particular offer.

Buy Now option - an element worth testing is also the "buy now" option. As a result, the customer's shopping journey will be significantly shortened, which will give him much less time to think about or give up purchasing the product.

Users' opinions

One of the Ceneo features is access to the opinions of other users about the store or product. The portal currently has over 38 million client opinions that increase credibility of vendors and are an additional source of information for future buyers. The report prepared by Gemius shows that, according to 46% of Internet users, the opinions about the store are the key factor for measuring credibility.

An element of building a credible image within the portal is collecting and encouraging users to express their satisfaction with the purchase. This can be done by adding a card of encouragement to each product or sending a separate request for feedback via e-mail.

Promotional tools

If the store does not invest additional funds in the promotion on Ceneo, the portal orders the offers according to price. That is why most of the traffic is obtained by offers from the top 3.

To stand out on the portal, the store has two tools available:

• Bidding on the top 3 - it is a manipulation of the rate per click, thanks to which it is possible to appear higher in the search results. From the point of view of the store, it is optimal to display your offer around the 2nd and 3rd places - the first place is usually very expensive, and the remaining ones are not really attractive in terms of acquired traffic.
• Highlighted offers - Another tool to promote your offer on the Ceneo portal is to highlight it to make it stand out among others

Monitor your competition

Ceneo is not only a sales tool, but also a great place to collect information about the offer and pricing policy of the competition. The store's position in relation to other entities will also allow drawing conclusions regarding the adopted bidding strategy.

Monitoring the competition has the advantage that a lot of research work has already been done by other stores, and thanks to monitoring, this knowledge can be easily and quickly acquired.

Think carefully about your offer

Not all products should be promoted through Ceneo. Also, not all products promoted in this channel fulfill the same role. The most popular roles that can be played by a specific product displayed on the portal include:

• Traffic creators - these are products whose task is to attract the customer to the store and build the first relationship with him. On this type of products, the margin is often lower, and the real earning on the customer comes during upselling or other form of lead monetization.
• Standard products - these are products that do not stand out particularly in terms of sales or margin potential.
• Profit generators - these are products that allow the store to achieve a higher margin, and thus generate more profit.

Each of these products can be promoted in a price comparison website, but their role and potential are completely different. This has a direct impact on the strategy that the store should follow when determining click rates or advertising budget.

Carefully monitor the costs of your activities

Ceneo can be an effective tool for promoting your store. With an appropriately set price per click, its cost may become even invisible, permanently included in the company's operations.

However, there is a danger in doing so. With a large scale of operation, the costs add up, and the less optimally selected level of expenditure, the higher this additional cost becomes.

With sales of one hundred products per month, differences of a few groszy per product will not make any difference. With a scale of tens of thousands of products per month, these differences can be clear and reflect the company's margin.

It is true that it is not possible to completely reduce the Ceneo commission, but keeping it as low as possible is in the clear interest of the store.

Analyze, check, experiment

Obtaining the most precise information on the costs and effectiveness of activities carried out is beneficial not only in the context of the costs of Ceneo itself. In practice, the store should test and improve every aspect of its promotional activities, including titles, call to action, photos or the layout of the page to which the buyer is transferred.

According to the 99firms portal, up to 77% of companies use A / B testing in their operations. An example of the effectiveness of the approach based on continuous improvement and optimization is Bing, which, thanks to tests, improved its revenue by up to 25% per search.

At the same time, even if a satisfactory level of expenses is achieved, it is recommended that the company continue to experiment and look for new tools to reduce its expenses - even the craziest or seemingly absurd ideas may result in gaining interesting knowledge.

Summary

Ceneo is one of the oldest price comparison websites in Poland and one of the most important portals from the perspective of Polish e-commerce. Skillful activities in this channel will allow the company to develop steadily. At the same time, poorly conducted activities can drain the margin and generate unnecessary, and at the same time hidden costs.

If you want to know more about Ceneo activities and how to improve them, please do not hesitate to contact us!