Why should your e-shop be on Heureka?

I believe many of you have visited Heureka at least once with the aim of finding the best offer and buying goods at the best possible price. Let us look together, though, at the corners of Heureka that may not be clear to everyone.

What is Heureka?

Heureka is the most used product search and comparison engine, popular above all on the Slovak and Czech markets. Users come to Heureka at various stages of the buying process. A large percentage of these users are those who already have an idea of what they want to buy and want to compare a given product across different shops.

Besides price, users often look at the shipping cost and reviews. If your business has a competitively priced offer and positive customer ratings, you can achieve a higher conversion rate on Heureka compared with other marketing tools.

It is not only a price comparison site

Heureka is a service whose aim is to bring together every source (shop catalogues, consumer goods magazines and so on) in one place and to help or advise users at the very start of their buying decision — which product to buy and where.

Besides being an excellent price comparison tool for products across various sellers, Heureka also offers the following:

• product search,
• product filtering within individual categories,
• the Verified by Customers award,
• an assortment report,
• the Heureka basket (Heureka Marketplace).

The Verified by Customers certificate

Heureka's aim is to recommend the customer the best shop where they can buy given goods on the best terms, taking various factors into account, not only price. To support customers' purchase intent online it takes into account above all the quality of a particular shop's service — from giving complete information about a product's price and keeping to the delivery time to the quality of communication from the seller throughout the process of handling and fulfilling the order, and so on.

What benefit does it bring your business?

First of all you gain very valuable feedback from your customers. You will learn how satisfied they were with the purchase and what they would suggest improving. If a relevant number of your customers are satisfied and give you positive ratings, you gain the Verified by Customers certificate, which will show on Heureka and also on your website.

There are several advantages connected with the Verified by Customers certificate:

• valuable customer feedback,
• adjusting the cost per click,
• downloading the SortimentReport,
• the chance to enter the ShopRoku competition,
• increasing conversions,
• exporting reviews to your site,
• placing the "Verified by Customers" icon on your site,
• an irrelevant negative review can be deleted,
• the questionnaires are more effective than your own questionnaires.

The Heureka basket

Besides the chance to gain the Verified by Customers certificate, Heureka also offers a service called the Heureka basket, otherwise Heureka MarketPlace. To be able to use the basket service, though, you first of all need to hold Verified by Customers status.

The essence of the "Heureka basket" service is that:

• you sell products directly on the Heureka site,
• Heureka will favour you in this case,
• you get the PayU payment gateway free,
• you pay Heureka a commission whose level is set by the category you sell in.

How does advertising on Heureka work?

The excellent news is that any e-shop offering suitable goods can advertise on Heureka. There are two advertising options — paid and unpaid.

Advertising in the unpaid mode costs you nothing. The main drawback is above all that your offer will show in the last places in full-text search.

With the paid version you pay by cost per click, much as with PPC advertising. Specifically it is a click-through from the comparison site to your e-shop. The cost per click is set on the basis of the product category your product is placed in, and each category may have a different cost per click.

The foundation is a proper feed

Once you have chosen the form in which you want to advertise on Heureka, the next step is uploading products correctly. Products are uploaded to Heureka through an XML feed. A feed is a data file containing information about the product being sold. It consists of its name, description, price, delivery date, the category the goods belong to and so on.

Heureka requires the feed to state information about the goods' composition including parameters such as colour, material and brand. It also recommends stating parameters such as style, cut, pattern and so on. The more detailed the product description you give, the greater the chance your product will be found and the greater the likelihood of a purchase.

A properly created feed should contain the following tags:

• PRODUCTNAME - the name contains the manufacturer, product number or code
• ITEM_ID - unambiguous, permanent product identification
• CATEGORYTEXT - the full path to the product
• DELIVERY - shipping cost for individual products
• DELIVERY_DATE - correctly stating product availability
• IMGURL_ALTERNATIVE, VIDEO_URL, ACCESSORY, GIFT - for improving presentation and displaying products
• ITEMGROUP_ID - size, colour, pattern variants and so on are individual products that can be grouped together

You will find the exact feed specification on Heureka's site HERE.

Higher positions thanks to raising CPC too

A well set-up feed is the foundation. But there is also room to adjust the cost per click above the minimum required by Heureka. By raising the cost per click you can move your product to a higher position.

As with search advertising, an auction takes place on Heureka too. In this case it works so that whoever offers a higher cost per click gets to more visible and more interesting positions.

Important information to bear in mind

If you want to advertise on Heureka effectively, the first step in the right direction is a well-prepared product feed. Then it is essential to assign products to categories correctly, as Heureka requires.

Basic account check

Basic optimisation steps:

1. Check that the product is in the right category.
2. The product name must match the product card.
3. Use the report of unmatched products and try to fix them.
4. Watch out for duplicate cards.

In this article I have introduced you to what Heureka is, what it is for and what it means from the point of view of promoting a business. I believe it is now a little clearer to you. Should you have any questions, do not hesitate to get in touch.