---
title: "The most effective way to advertise an online store"
author: "Stan Voo"
url: https://www.99rabbits.com/blog/the-most-effective-way-to-advertise-an-online-store
published: 2008-10-31
summary: "Flyers do little for an online store. What worked best for me in 2008 was listing products in shopping catalogs and price-comparison sites, and here is the list I knew."
---

# The most effective way to advertise an online store

I've long been puzzling over how to tell whether online advertising works.

*Which kind of advertising should you start with? What should you choose on a very tight budget? Where should a beginner in online business turn?*

I've noticed that the people who build online stores often know practically nothing about advertising online. They either come from offline business or have no business experience at all. Part of the blame may lie with how underdeveloped contextual advertising still is here, and how little "the general public" therefore knows about it.

For example, I came across a promotion plan for an internet project that had 7 items, 6 of them traditional offline advertising, including handing out leaflets and flyers. The one remaining item (the first, which at least is right) was about "promotion in search engines".

**In my very humble opinion, traditional offline advertising is of highly questionable use for promoting an online project.**

(Go on, prove me wrong with numbers!)

So here's some advice for people starting out online, and not only for them. It's based on my own (not that extensive) experience (!).

**Try advertising in product catalogs and price aggregators.** So far it's the most effective way I know to advertise products online.[^1]

Here are the systems of this kind I know. The first 5 are the most popular general product catalogs, each part of a big parent portal:

- [Yandex Market](http://market.yandex.ru/)
- [Meta Market](http://metamarket.com.ua/)
- [BigMir Shop](http://shop.bigmir.net/)
- [shop.i.ua](http://shop.i.ua/)
- [market.tut.ua](http://www.market.tut.ua/)

And the specialist aggregators (mostly electronics):

- [Nadavi](http://nadavi.net/)
- [Hotline.ua](http://hotline.ua/)
- [Free Market](http://freemarket.kiev.ua/)
- [Price.ua](http://price.ua/)
- [Torgovec.com.ua](http://torgovec.com.ua/)
- [MarketGid](http://marketgid.com/)
- [shoptraffic.com.ua](http://shoptraffic.com.ua/)
- [UkrShop](http://www.ukrshop.org/)
- [E-katalog](http://www.e-katalog.com.ua/)
- [I-M.COM.UA](http://i-m.com.ua/)
- [HotPrice](http://www.hotprice.com.ua/)
- [ava.com.ua](http://ava.com.ua/)
- [Auction.ua](http://auction.ua/)
- [goodslist.com.ua](http://www.goodslist.com.ua/)
- [controlf.biz.ua](http://www.controlf.biz.ua/)
- [pricegid.com.ua](http://pricegid.com.ua/) (a new system, still in testing)

[Yevgeny Shevchenko, aka Ace](http://ace.kiev.ua/ishops/), describes how they work clearly enough:

> One of the most effective channels for promoting an online store is, without doubt, placing your price lists on price-comparison sites. This is usually done by exporting data on your products and prices in an XML file, or some other way. The products land in the matching categories of the price-comparison sites, where thousands of users can see them and, if the price suits them, follow the link to your online store to buy.

**Further reading**, by the same Yevgeny: [Effective ways to promote an online store](http://ace.kiev.ua/ishops/).

[^1]: I'm leaving SEO out, because it isn't quite advertising. I may be wrong about that.