Next Generation Shopping

Interested in learning how to utilize APIs to create mashups, increase revenues, streamline reporting, and automate processes?

Vote for this to be a session held at the next affiliate summit (East) by following the link below: http://affiliatesummit.slinkset.com/items/Using_APIs_to_Maximize_Affiliate_Opportunities

Even if you aren’t sure if you are going to attend Affiliate Summit you can still quickly and easily vote! Simply register (only username / password required), and click the up arrow on the left hand side.

Also be sure to check out all the other great panel proposals for Affiliate Summit East 2010 located here: http://affiliatesummit.slinkset.com/

Facebook recently had its f8 conference and released a few small bits, like A New Data Model, major changes to the REST (Graph) API and Facebook Connect, and announced The Next Evolution of Facebook Platform…

Read the full post at Commerce Crunch

Social networking, the next big thing.  Facebook and Twitter have seen tremendous growth… By 2012 Forrester Research says Social Networking will… blah blah blah.  Well, in the world of successful affiliate revenue models Social Networking ranks just 1% higher than the Corporate Intranet?  Yikes!

This information comes from the most success affiliate revenue methods research performed by @Econsultancy (UK) in February 2009.

Let’s analyze the above chart.  Over 50% of the most successful affiliate revenue models are made up of SEO and PPC.  If you’re in the industry, you know this isn’t really a surprise.  However, only 3% from social networking.  Actually this isn’t surprising either due to the point in the shopping cycle when social networking takes place.  Most social shopping sites to date focus on Discovery, which is at the beginning of the shopping cycle.  Consumers are likely to end up doing price comparison, or looking for coupon (voucher) codes, or even cash-back before making a final purchase decision.

Further, it is difficult to tell from this chart if they are basing the data around  revenue coming “directly” from social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.  If that is the case then this does make sense.  It correlates with recent findings from Forrester Research:

"Sixty-two percent of US online buyers use social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace.com for communicating and keeping up with friends. Only 2% of US online buyers have purchased products through social networking sites. " (via MarketPilgrim.com in Andy Beal’s article “One Word Describes Affiliate Marketing via Social Networks – Craptastic!”)

Forrester also states “we shouldn’t rely on social networks to drive purchases anytime in the next five years.”  For direct revenue this may be true, but I think social networking already does, and will continue to, play a large role in affiliate revenue models.

While the rest of the data in the chart above is fairly straight forward I’m still not really sure I understand the break down completely.  I’m not certain if it is referring to direct PPC (no landing page) or all PPC activity in general.  I would also think Blogs and Forums could go hand and hand with content (SEO), and that voucher codes could also be grouped in with SEO or PPC.

Anyway… I still think the data can be misleading as social networking is still generally considered as a "complement" to other methods.  Are you able to pinpoint how much social networking correlates to your end of day revenue?  Perhaps that should be investigated first.

Here are some notable occurrences from August (starting with the earliest and proceeding through the month) in the web publisher, affiliate and developer space:

August ?? – CJ added the Commission Detail Service to their REST APIs.   This enables both advertisers and publishers to access real-time commission and item-detail data.  The REST version seems much much faster than the SOAP (tested this earlier in the year, response time may have improved at this point) and can return more products at once.

August 12th – LinkShare has now completely phased out its old interface.  The old reporting system was straight forward.  The new one has more features, but is also more clunky at times.  The main thing I used was the old reporting system for Signature Reports. If you are using Signature Reporting be sure to check out this blog article regarding the Signature Reports Web Service.  Note that there seems to be a bug with the EID/ChannelId.

August 15th – Amazon’s Product Advertising API now requires a new Authentication procedure goes into effect.  Unauthorized calls will be phased out.

Also note that Amazon semi-recently changed the Affiliate API name again (3rd or 4th time now?) now dubbed the Amazon Product Advertising API.  Read the FAQ here.

August 17th – eBay opens Seller Managed Applications for free, boosting developers ability to reach tons of sellers (end-users).  There was a large point of interest and some cool demos at this years eBay DevCon.

August 18th – eBay Partner Network moves to Quality Click Pricing system.  I’m going to have to read and re-read exactly how it works before I’ll have any serious feedback on it.

"Until now, eBay Partner Network has paid for sales and leads. With Quality Click Pricing, we will now instead pay affiliates for each click sent to an eBay site. The price paid per click will still depend on the short-term and long-term revenue of the traffic that the publisher drives to eBay, but will now also take into account the incremental value of that traffic to eBay, i.e., whether a sale happened as a direct result of the publisher’s actions. The greater the incremental revenue and the higher the expected lifetime value of the customers an affiliate sends, the higher the EPC and total earnings the affiliate will receive. Earnings Per Click (EPC) will be set daily for the previous day’s traffic."

This is a big change.  eBay later held a Webinar (on September 1st) which discussed this more in depth and took on a lot of obvious questions from affiliates.  I listened in to most of the webinar, but again more to come this  later.

August 20th – LinkShare replied that they have fixed the Signature Reports Web Service (Fix Confirmed).

August 31 – CNET Developers require a new Developer Key starting today.  CNET has been working with Mashery and now have a new system.   "If you would like to continue using the CNET API, you must start using a new Developer Key today. http://developer.cnet.com"

I decided to take a year off blogging to organize and dedicate time to some projects, as well as other things. It turned out to take a little longer (about 1 year and 10 months total) for me to get back to the blogging, but I’ve decided to start blogging again today.  I started off by upgrading the latest revision of WordPress, which looks much improved since version 2.0. This blog will still be focusing on ecommerce industry analysis, research, conference notes, etc. and as well as what I’ve been working on in the related field.  For now I will get right back into getting up some informational posts. 

I won’t be joining the crazy people out there on Black Friday this time around. I prefer to stay in the warmth, at a safe distance away from retail stores.  I intend to do my shopping strictly online. This is why… the best I can remember it anyway:

Last year I went to Circuit City mainly for the experience, but also to pick up a Samsung 22 Inch LCD monitor since they had for a really good price (after rebate). I thought maybe I’d pickup a couple other things while I was there too. That idea got shot down about the second I entered the store, but more on that later. So the story begins, I got up early (4:30 AM?) and went to the closest Circuit City. I arrived and found some parking suprisingly. I laughed as I walked by people in tents at the front of the line. I kept walking back to the edge of the store and then I noticed that the line curled around the side of the building a few times. I wasn’t laughing anymore. I found a spot in line, at the end of the last curl. To my surprise it actually went pretty quick once the doors opened. I got inside within an hour of the store opening.  The monitors were towards the back with the computers, so I started to make my way over there

I soon noticed that there were human-created bottlenecks all over the store.  It took some forcing to get through. Once I got to the back of the store, there was a long line for the computer related items. Circuit City had set it up so that anyone looking for a computer item had to ask a store rep and then the rep had to key it into the computer. Someone else then had to go into the back and look for it. Meanwhile, everyone else had to wait for the one person. It was the worst setup I have ever seen, seriously, ever. I waited for a while and people started to get unruly. I’ll leave out the boring in-between details. After about an hour and half of not moving at all I got out of my spot, and pulled a rep over. As it turns out, they were having computer difficulties in that section to boot. I left the store a little while later with nothing but frustration.

I ended up getting the monitor (sitting on my desk now) online later that day (shortly before taking a nap). I ended getting it cheaper online because I had a gotten a gift certificate or coupon code off eBay! All that trouble for nothing!

Here is what I learned and some tips:

• It is an experience, and the idea of it is really fun. Once you get into the store the fun ends. A crowd of hungry consumers pack into the store, making any size store look miniature. Pushing and shoving begins, and fights over short-supply items. Remember to maintain composure and your end goal.
• Many of the same deals are posted online later in the day or on the following Monday (Cyber Monday). A word of warning though, many of the extremely hot or hard to get items are likely to sell out.
• Know what you want to get before you get into the store. Have a priority list and know when to cut your losses. Remember, you can probably get some of the items online later.

This is a follow up to my previous post “Open Source E-Commerce Storefront Solutions Comparison for ASP.NET and PHP” in which I had compared two open source E-Commerce solutions (one for ASP.NET and one for PHP) as well as a full-source paid solution (Znode Storefront).

First off, a couple updates with regards to Znode…

1. Znode Storefronts has recently changed their pricing structure. They have dropped their Standard edition since my original blog post. Now they have Professional, Advanced, and Server editions. The reason I mention this is because the Professional price is labeled at $995, a $500 jump from the now extinct Standard version. This puts the software in the same category as other popular ASP.NET E-Commerce solutions, and so more must be expected.
2. Znode has launched a Developer portal and Knowledgebase at kb.znode.com. They seem to be off to a good start with that, and hopefully it will continue to grow. A strong developer community and responsive customer support is really what makes a product shine!

As I previously mentioned, Znode has hiked its price up. Two other solutions that are currently set in the same price range of a thousand bucks are ASPDotNet Storefront (ML Edition / DotNetNuke) and AbleCommerce 7.0. In this post we’ve got some great guest commentary from one of our readers, Jim Swanson. He recently had to make a decision in which he looked at Znode, AbleCommerce and ASPDotNetStorefront. In his research he found AbleCommerce to be the most promising for ventures. Read more »

I’m doing a side project that involves setting up a merchant e-commerce site. What I have come to quickly realize is that there are a ton of e-commerce shopping cart solutions out there! With a small budget for the project, I was looking for something that was open source. I’ve written this article about two that grabbed my attention, and why I ended up going with a paid solution. This is in no way a complete analysis so if you are looking for more e-commerce solutions, PayPal has a great list (all PayPal enabled of course), and 411ASP.NET has a list specific to .NET.

I should mention that the majority of this write-up contains personal notes, but hopefully they are helpful to those interested (as I did do a fair amount of research). Again, the first two solutions I looked at are currently FREE and open source. The third costs $500 (Standard version), which comes with the full source code upon purchase, but isn’t open source.

Getting Started

Here are the solutions I looked at:

dashCommerce is the successor to Commerce Starter Kit, and is freely available on CodePlex. This is great for those ASP.NET developers used to working with it that wish to contribute. However, it seems to be a one man show right now as far as development. We’ll see if it can indeed keep pace with the market.

Magento Commerce is an open source PHP e-commerce solution led by Los Angelos based E-Commerce firm Varien. The solution stakes claim to unprecedented flexibility and control. You can jump into learning right away as they have a bunch of tutorial screencasts on their site.

Znode Storefront is an ASP.NET 2.0 solution that “specializes in secure, scalable e-commerce solutions driven by customer needs.”

Below are my notes on some parts I was most interested in. I have provided additional information in a tabular grid below as well.

Development Status

• Magento was recently launched in Beta and it is not recommended to use in a production environment. A functional version is in the works and Varien is shooting for Q1 2008.
• dashCommerce has just released version 2.2 and has sites in a product environment. Major changes are in order for the next version (3.0) which is slated tentatively for December 2007 / Q1 2008.
• Znode Storefront has sites and can be used in the production environment.

Community Following

• Magento seems to have the largest community following of the three. They have a Wiki section and allow the community to contribute. Continued development is by Varien.
• dashCommerce has a decent community following, but it currently seems somewhat disorganized. Community can contribute via CodePlex. Continued development is by Chris Cevyas.
• Znode, not being open source like the others, does not appear to have much of an active community. However, they seem to be dedicated to continued improvement of their product (see roadmap).

User Interface / CSS

• Magento. I’m a sucker for good lucks and that’s exactly what Magento is: Good Looking! Utilizing Scriptlicious, AJAX, and tagging it has Web 2.0 written all over it. It comes with a wide array of features “out of the box.”
• Znode has a structured CSS and Master Page system setup that seems ideal for customization. The admin area allows editing of CSS via a form Textbox similar to working in the popular Wordpress blogging software. It boasts further AJAX UI in future versions.
• dashCommerce seems to be the most messy to tailor via CSS. This should be changing in their next release, version 3.0. Read more »

Finally a Half.com API?  I just got word that the Half.com product inventory will now be available through the eBay Shopping Web Services.  It seems that it is actually just an additional API call (FindHalfProducts) rather than a full API itself.  I (and other developers) have been wondering for some time now why eBay hasn’t made this feature available to its web publisher and developer network. 

This API feature had been slated for release during July ‘07 according to the eBay Road Map.

More news coming next week.  Right from the e-mail:

• How does this help me?

  • Half.com product and pricing information will now be available via a Shopping API returning data in near real time. This will allow you to provide your shoppers with accurate and up-to-date information.
• Where can I get more information?
  • Information will be available at developer.ebay.com. The API name is “FindHalfProducts” and it is available as a Shopping Services API.
• How do I sign up and begin ramping up using the API?
  • Signing up is simple and free: You must have a developer account at developer.ebay.com. Documentation for the new FindHalfProducts API will be available at:
    developer.ebay.com/DevZone/shopping/docs/CallRef/index.html
• When will this be available?
  • We are shooting for the API to be available next week! Watch for a follow-up notice to announce availability!

Web Publishers: Half.com has a separate affiliate program running on CJ.

By the time I had checked my feed reader this morning, Brian Smith had already covered Shopping.com’s latest press release.  If you are a reader of Brian’s blog then you know he has been very critical of Shopping.com the past couple years.  So I was sure I was dreaming when I read his post title “Shopping.com Gets With The Program.”  Alas, I was not dreaming… They are planning to release the following quality innovations for merchants:

• Product Performance Reporting
• SKU Level Bidding
• Shopping.com Cart
• Distributed Commerce Program

These will be accesible through a merchant portion of the Shopping.com API, slated for beta release in 2008.  You can read the details about the items mentioned above in the press release or on Ed’s etaildtail blog entry.

Now, what does this mean to a Partner in the Shopping.com Developer Network?  Simply put conversion will effect your CPC rate.  Directly from Shopping.com:

“the revenue per click to publishers will also be adjusted based on the merchant CPC. We evaluate the quality of traffic from our distribution partners by measuring the conversion to sale and adjust the merchants’ cost per click accordingly.”

More…

• All existing agreements to remain the same
• To continue to receive a share of the merchant revenue
• To be evaluated based on a new metric: Quality Score. This metric will determine the value a partner receives on each click and will be available in the Partner Account Center upon launch of VBP.

I’m hoping that Shopping.com will ensure publisher partners have the information neccessary to increase their conversion and provide a higher quality of clicks.

This will change the landscape dramatically, especially for those pumping low quality clicks through SDC.  But at the end of the day, its all for the better.  From Shopping.com:

“Value-Based Pricing will encourage merchants to increase their investment with Shopping.com, driving a mutually beneficial relationship between partners and merchants and reinforcing our ecosystem.”