With the Christmas holiday coming up the stores are packed with shoppers looking for that great deal or that perfect gift. This is also the best time of the year to own a shopping site. Just like the retail industry, shopping sites do a ton of volume during the last quarter of the year. More shopping sites are started in Q4 than any other quarter. One of them is Shopping Addicted and they’ve order this ReviewMe review to generate some Q4 buzz.
Shopping Addicted is a brand new blog, started on November 26 with the goal of handing out shopping tips and finding great shopping deals. The site would be a text book case in how to create a great shopping affiliate site except one big flaw, which I’ll explain in a bit.
Nice Simple Layout
The layout of Shopping Addicted is very clean but its navigation is a bit lacking. The only links are to home, advertising, contact and archives. Where are the category links? I know the blog has more than one category because the posts are filed under Gift Ideas, Shop Reviews, Product Reviews and Other.
The post themselves are extremely short and not very detailed, especially for the product reviews. I wouldn’t even call them reviews. For example this was the entire review of the Sony KDL-46xBR4.
Sony is known for great quality in all of their electronics (while usually at a higher ticket price). Despite paying a little more, the Sony KDL-4XBR4 (Bravia series) is the most popular HDTV. It’s a 46 inch LCD, TFT active matrix meaning that the picture is refreshed more than other models, allowing for a smoother image, especially when there is a lot of movement. Of course this TV supports 1080p resolution! Definitely check out this TV this holiday season to find a good deal!
Find the best deal on the Sony KDL-46XBR4 at OnSale.com
It’s pretty obvious the only purpose of the posts are to get you click on the affiliate links and while there is nothing wrong with that, I would like to see Shopping Addicted do a better pitch than just writing some fluff. Then again, it’s pretty hard to do a product review when you don’t actually have the product to review.
Did The Editors Quit?
Shopping Addicted started off on the right foot with multiple updates per day. However, in the past week, updates has slowed to less than one per day. The last updated was on December 3rd. You can’t run a shopping site like that. There are tons of deals on the net and shoppers are not going to read your site if you’re only post a deal a day. The TechZone’s Hot Deals page had 22 deals posted for December 6th and 26 deals for December 5th. We post so many deals we only show two days worth or the page will get too long. New deals are always posted at midnight and we have never gone one day without posting at least a dozen deals.
Running a shopping site requires a tremendous commitment and constant updating. It’s not like a blog where you can get away with one post (or less) per day. Your competition is posting dozens of deals every day and if you can’t match that, you’re in trouble. Shopping Addicted biggest flaw is the lack of timely updates. Maybe they went into this thinking they can run the site like a normal blog. If that is the case, they’re in for a rude awakening. If they are serious, they need to crank out at least a dozen posts per day to even stand a chance of competing against the more established sites.
The name of the site is Shopping Addicted. It stands to reason they’re going after people who are addicted to shopping. An addicted shopper wants to see dozens of new shopping deals every time they visit. If Shopping Addicted can provide that, they’ll get the shopper addicted to their site.