Do you like to save money on your online purchases?  Do you feel good when you get a great deal?  If you answered yes, then you’re probably already using Comparison Shopping Engines (CSE) at some point in your product search, like millions of shoppers are already doing.

2008 has been a bad year for the economy, which means it will likely be a good year to take advantage of the traffic going to CSEs. Socially-based sites like Become and Pronto have more than doubled their traffic over the last six months, and in Q4 2007 NexTag spent $75MM in online pay-per-click advertising to promote itself. According to major studies by comScore, CSEs are set to pick up more customers and attract more revenue.

There are more comparison sites than ever and more shoppers using them every month. As a marketer it is possible to make more money from this channel than traditional PPC in engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN. If that doesn’t happen for you, then you might find that, at a minimum, you could be generating incremental revenue at a very respectable ROI.

Comparison shopping engines can be more effective for certain types of retailers than others, but the space is opening up new doors to products of all kinds from every niche you could think of. Your chances of success are higher if you differentiate yourself from competitors with low prices, progressive shipping and refund policies, and consistently have in-demand items in stock.

We see every week how much more influential CSEs are in the purchase path. Many times customers will click on a PPC ad, find a product they like on your site, and then go to three or four comparison engines looking for the best deal, finally clicking back to your site through a branded PPC term to make a purchase. Odds are you’ll see that sale attributed to your brand, but additional visibility in the CSEs helped make that sale possible.