Want to increase your profits from online sales? Advertise on comparison sites and marketplaces. This will give you visibility for your goods and your online store, so shoppers will reach for them before your competitors. Which sales channel to choose, what are the advantages and disadvantages and how to get started? Here is an overview of the most famous Central Europe advertising platforms that you must try this year.
What are marketplaces?
Marketplaces are online platforms that allow different sellers to offer their products through one website. This allows customers to have a wide selection of goods from different sellers on these marketplaces, making it easy to compare prices and products. Some of the best known and largest marketplaces include Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, Etsy. In the Czech Republic and the Central Europe it is MALL.CZ, Aukro, Alza.cz, Zboží.cz, Slevomat and now also Allegro or Kaufland.
Benefits for customers:
- Wide selection of goods in one place.
- Easy price and product comparison.
- Credibility and security of purchase thanks to reviews and ratings.
Benefits for retailers:
- Large and diverse customer base.
- Easy accessibility to market without the need for an e-store.
- Improved market visibility due to the popularity of the platform.
Marketplaces vs. price comparison sites
While marketplaces allow customers to search for products, compare prices from different sellers and even buy directly on these platforms, commodity comparators do not usually provide the option to buy products directly, but rather redirect users to individual seller’s websites or marketplaces where they can purchase the product. The aim of a “comparison shopping site” is simply to collect information about products from different online stores and allow customers to compare the prices and features of these products in one place. However, the truth is that many comparison sites already allow a product to be purchased directly on their site, slowly blurring the distinctions between these platforms.
The most famous online marketplaces in CEE
The world’s most popular social network and a powerful tool for marketing communications. This is Facebook. This channel allows advertising through sponsored posts, PPC and e-commerce merchandise advertising using XML feed. Facebook’s strength as an advertising channel has grown with the acquisition of Instagram and the integration of their marketing capabilities.
Heureka marketplace
Heureka is the most used product search engine in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Until recently it was only a comparison shopping site, now it also operates as a successful marketplace within Heureka marketplace (formerly Košík). This latter model facilitates shopping by allowing users to purchase selected goods from the online store directly on Heureka without being redirected to it, thus reducing the risk of losing a customer. To use this service, online stores must be certified Verified by customers, have a long-term top rating and be in PPC mode. Heureka offers over 4 million unique products and its strongest category is white goods.
Google Shopping
Google Shopping or also Google Shopping is one of the largest comparison shopping engines in the world. Google Shopping campaigns are one type of Google Ads. Typically, they link to a specific product, contain a picture of the product, its price and a short description. They are often a significant source of conversions. Through Google Shopping, you can market your products in dozens of countries around the world.
Alza
Alza.cz (AlzaTrade for retailers) is one of the largest Czech marketplaces for consumer electronics, but also has a presence in the toy, sports, hobby, media and entertainment, perfume, watches and drugstore segments. Initially, Alza sold only its own goods, but like other well-known marketplaces, it later included products from other sellers in its range. Uploading products to Alza is done via a classic XML feed, which you can easily edit in MERGAGO. AlzaTrade offers a slightly different model than the usual marketplaces. On AlzaTrade, individual sellers do not sell products to the customer, but the company Alza. Customers thus enter into a contract directly with Alza. The latter is thus responsible for the complete sales and sales process, including complaints, and is responsible for the delivery of goods and the provision of all services. In relation to Alza, the individual sellers are then in the position of suppliers.
What are marketplaces and how they can help your business
Kaufland
Kaufland Global Marketplace is part of the Schwarz Gruppe and is one of the fastest growing online marketplaces in Germany. In February 2023, Kaufland’s online marketplace also entered Slovakia (Kaufland.sk) and a month later also the Czech market (Kaufland.cz). The German Kaufland.de offers more than 25 million products in 5000+ categories, sold by over 7000 retailers. The platform registers 32 million visits per month. One registration is all you need to expand to other markets.
Mall.cz
Mall.cz is the largest local marketplace in terms of number of active sellers and the second largest marketplace in the country in terms of turnover. Apart from the Czech Republic, we also operate in Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Slovenia and Croatia. With more than four thousand employees across the region, MALL Group offers its services to 130 million people in Central and Eastern Europe. It has been part of the Allegro Group since 2022.
Allegro
Allegro is the largest online shopping platform in Poland and one of the largest marketplaces in Europe. In the Czech Republic, it became very well known after the purchase of Mall.cz (currently it also owns CZC.cz). Allegro is visited by millions of users per month, therefore it is one of the largest marketplaces in the world. Since May 2023, it has also been operating in the Czech Republic as Allegro.cz, offering goods from several thousand domestic and Polish sellers.
Zboží.cz
Zboží.cz is the second most used comparison site in the Czech Republic. It was founded in 2007 by the search engine Seznam.cz. It currently facilitates online shopping with an extensive section of discounts, guides, video reviews, user reviews or a wide range of accessories in the product profile.
In 2020, the search on Seznam was expanded to include product information from Zboží.cz to give shoppers the best possible information about the online store’s offer in the shortest possible time.
It offers marketing agencies and freelancers a verified agency programme where they can capitalise on its professional approach to managing online marketing campaigns.
Marketplaces and MERGADO
MERGADO is an innovative tool that helps e-tailers maximize the benefits that marketplaces offer. It is a versatile product feed management platform that allows optimizing data and distributing it efficiently to different online channels. With MERGADO, you can manage feeds and manage advertising for more than 600 product comparison sites and marketplaces in the Czech Republic and abroad.
What can MERGADO help you with?
Data unification and optimization
MERGADO can combine data from different sources, thus facilitating the process of transferring product information to different marketplaces. It makes it easy to adjust and optimize data to be as efficient as possible and attract the most customers.
Support for multiple marketplaces
There are a variety of marketplaces on the market. MERGADO is not limited to one specific platform, but supports many different marketplaces around the world. Currently MERGADO supports over 600 advertising systems in 50 countries on 6 continents. This allows online stores to easily and efficiently expand into new markets and reach new customers.
PPC Ad Management
MERGADO offers its capabilities to anyone who doesn’t want to set up their PPC campaigns in a complicated way. By using it, you can generate campaigns for search networks, display ads, shopping campaigns or DSA campaigns from one place and automatically. You can optimize your ads automatically using smart rules. To get full control over your advertising, just upload the feed to MERGADO and link it to your chosen ad system.
Automatic data update
The MERGADO application can automatically update product data on all supported marketplaces. This means that sellers don’t have to spend time and energy manually updating information on each platform.
Analysis and monitoring of results
MERGADO provides useful analytical tools that allow sellers to monitor the performance of their products on different marketplaces. This allows them to optimize their strategies and achieve better sales results.
What you might find useful:
- We offer Audit feed for all domains and whisper category tree automatically.
- Does your online store run on any open-source online store platform? Connect it conveniently with MERGADO using the MERGADO Pack.
- Bulk edit images that are very important for advertising in the Feed Image Editor app.
- Are you tempted by foreign markets? The Translating Parrot app can handle feed translation. So there’s nothing stopping you from advertising in new markets.
MERGADO Marketplaces app
Do you sell on Allegro or Kaufland? Then you might be interested in the MERGADO Marketplaces app (formerly Ordelogy Products). This app can get product listings from the online store to the Allegro Marketplace and Kaufland Global Marketplace. You can easily and automatically connect your data in your Business account with campaigns. Each of them can have custom settings, e.g. for different product categories based on selections from the MERGADO Editor.
How can MERGADO Marketplaces help you
- Automatically design, create and upload product listings from your XML feed in MERGADO.
- Synchronize every 15 minutes product availability.
- Synchronize product offer statuses every 15 minutes.
- Create and synchronize an unlimited number of product offers.
- Quickly and easily connect MERGADO with Allegro and Kaufland. You do not copy the secret key or login. Just log into your Allegro Business account and MERGADO at the same time.
Marketplaces are an important element of today’s e-commerce and represent huge potential for growth and expansion of sellers. MERGADO is a valuable tool to help e-tailers and marketers take full advantage of these opportunities. Whichever marketplace you choose to advertise on, with MERGADO you can easily and efficiently manage and advertise your products on different platforms and reach a wider audience of customers.