Goodbye to Yahoo Shopping

Lesley Gross - January 20, 2010

Less than a month after Yahoo pulled the plug on their popular Paid Inclusion program. The company has decided to outsource its shopping engine to PriceGrabber. This decision to exit the shopping engines won’t come as too much of a shock to those in the industry given Yahoo’s future plans with search advertising. However, it is surprising that they decided to give this business to PriceGrabber over Microsoft’s platform, Bing Shopping.

Perhaps Yahoo believes that by giving Microsoft their shopping business, they will eventually become too dependent on them. Either way, it should be interesting to see how this will play out for all parties involved.

Most importantly is how this will affect the advertisers. My suggestion would be to stay ahead of the game and open an account with PriceGrabber directly. Be ready to capture the major shift in traffic as the largest shopping engine outsources all their traffic to a direct a comparison shopping site. By advertising through these types of engines you have the ability to reach a more qualified audience.