The Shopzilla Flop

Hello good people!

Hope everyone’s week has gotten off to a great start and your adsense journeys are going well. Today I’m going to put a lid on one of my recent experiments…

As you know, several weeks ago I built a few hundred new websites that heavily incorporated Shopzilla ads in addition to the regular adsense ads that I usually use.

I wanted to know if Shopzilla was a good alternative income stream (hey, it’s always good to diversify away from Adsense when possible). I’ve posted updates
here and here showing my progress so far.

Things started off slowly, but as the new sites got indexed at Google, I started seeing traction. The first two weeks averaged around 650 impressions per day across all the sites and then slowly started to increase.

There were very few actual ad clicks or earnings for the first couple of weeks but they slowly started to increase as time went on.

As the stats started to edge into the thousands of impressions per day level, clicks remained paltry. We’re talking 1 to 3 clicks a day and less than $.50 cents a day in earnings.

I started to ask around and tons of people told me the same thing. They said that you have to register ALL your websites with Shopzilla in order for them to count clicks. I had only registered one of my sites (because that’s all shopzilla asked for when I opened the account, and in fact they only give you space to list one site).

Could that be the problem? There were clearly thousands of people visiting my sites…were they clicking on ads but not being counted?

A couple days ago I bit the bullet and decided to contact Shopzilla. I logged into my shopzilla account and clicked the “Contact Us” link and filled out the online form. I simply told them that I wanted to place shopzilla ads on multiple sites, and asked them if I needed to provide shopzilla with a list of those sites”.

I got back the standard response: “We received your message and will contact you within 48 hours”.

So I waited…and waited. And got no response.

The day I sent the email, my shopzilla reports showed 1,617 impressions, 2 clicks, and $.31 cents in earnings.

The next day: ZERO impressions, ZERO clicks, and ZERO earnings.

Yep that’s right…zero. I don’t think I have to tell you that it’s just not possible to go from 1,617 impressions one day to zero the next.

Someone at shopzilla clearly read my email and decided to flip a switch and shut off my account and didn’t even bother to notify me.

My sites are still all SHOWING shopzilla ads, but no impressions, clicks, or earnings are being reported on my account.

Maybe someone over there took a look at the referrer logs and then took a look at my sites and decided that they didn’t like them for some insane reason. Who knows…I’ll probably never figure out exactly what happened.

It’s been an interesting few weeks but I’m ready to call this one and say that the people at Shopzilla are jokers and that you should never do business with them. I’m not ready to claim that they are engaged in outright fraud, but something’s clearly not right over there.

I recommend that you all stay away from them completely.

It’s too bad, they might have been a really neat alternative to adsense and amazon ads…But now we know. Back to the drawing board!

Keep on building!

-John Elder
The Marketing Fool!

EDIT: Wow a few hours after I published this blog post I received a flurry of email from Shopzilla support. I may have spoken too soon. Seems they aren’t jokers after all. I’ll post details tomorrow.

John Elder is an Entrepreneur, Web Developer, and Writer with over 27 years experience creating & running some of the most interesting websites on the Internet. Contact him here.

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