Shopping directory
Encyclopedia
A shopping directory is a "Yellow Pages Directory Style" website similar to the Open Directory Project
or the Yahoo! Directory
with focus on sites that sell products or services, usually referred to as ecommerce websites.
A shopping directory is different than a shopping search engine or shopping comparison site.
There are free directories that are updated by volunteers, but they are more the exception than the norm on the Internet today.
Open Directory Project
The Open Directory Project , also known as Dmoz , is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links. It is owned by Netscape but it is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors.ODP uses a hierarchical ontology scheme for organizing site listings...
or the Yahoo! Directory
Yahoo! Directory
The Yahoo! Directory is a web directory that rivals the Open Directory Project in size. The directory was Yahoo!'s first offering. When Yahoo! changed to crawler-based listings for its main results in October 2002, the human-edited directory's significance dropped, but it was still being updated in...
with focus on sites that sell products or services, usually referred to as ecommerce websites.
A shopping directory is different than a shopping search engine or shopping comparison site.
Business models
- Charging a one-time and/or recurring listing/review fee
- Use of affiliate programsAffiliate marketingAffiliate marketing is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's own marketing efforts...
of the listed ecommerce sites to earn commissions on referrals - Advertising in the directory itself, such as banner ads, contextual adsContextual advertisingContextual advertising is a form of targeted advertising for advertisements appearing on websites or other media, such as content displayed in mobile browsers...
like Google AdSense or some form of sponsored listings (usually pay per clickPay per clickPay per click is an Internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, where advertisers pay the publisher when the ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market...
based) - a combination of the above
There are free directories that are updated by volunteers, but they are more the exception than the norm on the Internet today.