This afternoon, while giving my Chitika ad campaign a makeover, I discovered several times that the so-called 'best deals' offered by Chitika are considerably more expensive than the price actually advertised on the product maker's home page. WTF? Has anybody else experienced this? And what do you do in this situation? I can't in good conscience allow an advertisement to run on my web pages purporting to offer a 'best deal' that is, at times, double the manufacturer's list price.
why not? you don't set the prices that the sites choose to sell at; nor does chitika. There is nothing unethical about offering the same product at different prices to different customers - amazon does this all the time.
So nobody has a problem with this scenario: Joe Web Surfer hits your site and sees a Chitika ad selling Brand X green widgets for $40. He decides to click through and is satisfied with what he sees and decides to actually buy a Brand X green widget for $40. Then, several weeks later, he stumbles upon the actual Brand X home page where he sees the exact same Brand X green widgets selling for $20. Feeling stupid and ripped off, he recollects where he first saw the ad to buy Brand X green widgets at the inflated price. Your website. No one has a problem with this?
I get emails from people who order from Amazon. I doubt people remember who referred them to what site to buy what. Besides, the customer is more apt to not search for the item again after they buy it - if they are happy, they are happy.
This is in my opinion a very big issue. Generally, people already have an idea of what a product costs before they go out to buy it (people do research these things). If someone sees the product in an ad listed for 1.5 or 2x as much as they have seen it before - their intest in clicking on the ad to potentially buy the product falls off substantially. If I were in the market for a slinky, and I know they run about $5 - there's no way in hell you catch me clicking slinky ads with slinky's for sale at $10. Good point - very important IMO.
The thing for me is: If I am going to put something on my site that tells my visitors that it is the "Best Deal" - it had better damn well be a good deal... It's a little disgusting when you see an advert on your site where the item is running $500 when you know very well that the average surfer knows they can get it at Wal Mart for $350. It just doesn't make sense to advertise products at a higher rate than what most people are willing to pay. To each his/her own though. If it works for you - it works... and who can argue with that?!
I don't really have a problem with the fact that for many items you can find better deals than what is offered in the eminimall. They can't be expected to have advertising arrangements with every vendor of each product. What does bother me though is when within the minimall the title says 'best deal at store A', but you go to the 'best deals' tab and store b and store c have better prices.... yet store a is shown as the 'best deal'. I asked chitika about this and they said the store with the higher bid amount gets listed in the title regardless if it is the best price of those listed on the 'best deals' tab.