A week ago I wrote about the start up fees of some of the shopping comparison engines. In that post, I stated that Shopping.com’s (SDC) minimum initial deposit (which goes towards clicks - there is no setup fee) is $100. This is incorrect. The actual initial deposit is only $25 (down from $500). I was charged $100 because I ran across a small bug that SDC is working to fix (and could have already fixed by the time of this post). If you signed up with SDC within the last couple weeks and were charged $100, you should send an email to customer service.

Discovering this minor bug gave me the opportunity to talk briefly with Trent Scoffield, Director US Sales & Operations…

The old initial deposit was $500. Why the change?
“We’re testing different things. Just as we advice merhcants to test and analyze, that strategy is also widely adopted [within the company]. We don’t want merchants thinking that we’re a keyword service. And we’re not sure the low price point implies that. There’s a lot of work with feeds. At different price points, you get different merchants. At $500 you’re going to get someone who’s figured it all out. At $25 we can get all merchants and spend the time to educate them. There’s going to be a heavy investment on turst and safety, but also education.”

Merchants no longer have to fax back a credit card authorization agreement. Why the change? PriceGrabber requires merchants to fax back a 15 page document…
“Requiring merchants to fax back the form, well, it’s just a bonus for any company to do that. To get a signature, CVV, to keep that on file, etc. We’re now ok not receiving those. It made us really make sure that we had the best merchants on the site who were going to pay they bills. It was slowing us down, though, and it was an inconvenience to the merchant. We’re now checking [security information] programatically.”