Next Generation Shopping

Mashupfeed.com is a new site that lists the latest mashups. Users are also able to tag the mashups. The third most popular tag was shopping, which I was happy to see (mapping is the first- by far). It is run by John Musser of ProgrammableWeb. He added a cool feature today that allows you to see the Recent Popuplar Favorite mashups… You can read more at his blog entry here…

But what I found more interesting was the stats at the top. An average of 2.62 mashups a day! At that rate there could be over 1,000 new mashups this year! And if it keeps growining exponentially, that number could blow up real fast. While there are only 360 mashup/examples currently listed in his database, my question is this high number good or bad? Will many of them shakeout as they lose their “new-and-cool” appearance, or will they become important part of the net? Time will tell.

Technorati Tags: mashups

Important is the social aspect to shopping, especially for the female gender.  We’ve seen social networking sites become huge… Myspace and Facebook are amongst the two most popular that I have actually used.  But what about adding shopping to that.  Well thats the business plan for Yub.com, which was produced/bought by Buy.com.  Pete Cashmore calls it the “MySpace for Shopping” in a recent blog post on his Mashable site.  For a community incentive to particpate there is even a revenue sharing model.  You share your thoughts on products, etc and people can “Buy though you”- thats where you would get some of the revenue.  Overall, an interesting concept, however, they only list a set of stores, and set it up as a virtual mall (which is a fitting idea, you can even browse in 3d).   Although the list of stores is growning, there are still many more e-tailers out there not listed.

What if you combine social shopping and comparison shopping… And throw revenue sharing in there too?  Feel free to Contact us or leave a comment on this if you are interested in working on a web 2.0 project with this concept.

Technorati Tags: social networking, community, virtual mall, comparison shopping, revenue sharing, web 2.0

Off Topic for this site… but seems to be big news today…

For those who haven’t heard yet today, there is speculation that Yahoo is to buy Digg for over $30 Million…  Sources are Jeremy Burton and Kevin Burton (Mashable.com)…  Kevin Rose (of Digg) of course denies any of these rumors.

Will the madness ever stop?

Price comparison engines put a lot of marketing dollars into PPC advertising… Personally, I think they should concentrate more on affiliate marketing and revenue share.

The most common method I have seen to date has been through co-branding. A variety of sites will co-brand with a pricing comparison service to push interested consumers to the site to seek buying choices. I think the next logical step, which some comparison engines have already taken, is to provide the data as an API / Web Service. Allowing the data to be seemlessly integrated into sites is important to users’. Pricing information can be revealed without having to go out of site. Although co-branding provides the “in-site” feeling to some degree, it is very limiting.

Below is a list of what type of affiliation services the major shopping comparison engines currently provide (to my knowledge).

Shopping.com
Affiliate Program: Yes | Co-branding: Yes | API / Web Service: Yes
Shopping.com has an an XML API that all-in-all is the only one that can actually be implemented in a web site. I have used the Shopping.com API to power my latest site (see example of it). Shopping.com will give you some documentation to get started with and then you are on your own. If you have heard of Chitika’s eMiniMalls, then you should know it is also powered by the Shopping.com API. The biggest upside to the Shopping.com API is that they pay and the limit on the API call is very high. The downside, no developer community.

The Shopping.com API is hard to find any information about. I would suggest emailing them about it. But as of right now they are restructuring their associate department. You can also e-mail me or leave comments on this post if you are interested in more information.

Payout: 50% Revenue Share. This translates to a minimum that varies by category from $0.02 to $0.50.

PriceGrabber
Affiliate Program: Yes | Co-branding: Yes | API / Web Service: No
They have had co-branding (see example) for a long time now. To my knowledge, they have no API or web service. I would be most interested to see an API from PriceGrabber as I feel they provide the most thorough and complete product information for several categories.
For Business Development, contact bizdev@pricegrabber.com

Payout: I believe they pay a flat $0.10 Per-click out to a merchant, but contact there business development for details.

NexTag
Affiliate Program: Yes | Co-branding: Yes | API / Web Service: No
With NextTag you will initially earn $0.05 for each user and you have the opportunity to increase this fee based on the quality of traffic that you refer to NexTag. I have only seen a few sites that have implemented the NextTag affiliate program. NextTag has OpenSearch rss feeds, which I assume you can use inconjunction with the affiliate program… The next step would be a full API.

Payout: $0.05 and up depending on traffic.
Read more »

Technorati Tags: Shopping.com, PriceGrabber, NexTag

So I finally took a look at BaeBo (If you haven’t heard of BaeBo it is a mashup that combines 10 different services)…  When you first come to the BaeBo homepage it looks to be messy. Its main feature is combining Amazon, ebay and Yahoo! Shopping.  You can type in keywords to do a product search on these three major e-commerce engines.  The results come in columns below it.   So you are esentially searching three search engines at once. This part of it reminds me a bit of A9 Opensearch.

Combing Amazon, Yahoo Shopping and ebay in some aspect is similiar to what we did with SecretPrices, except we use Shopping.com API rather than Yahoo API for pricing comparison.  But the interface is radically different.  We are using regular expressions (they rock!) to match exact products between Amazon and Shopping.com (and soon eBay).  This provides some added-value to the end-user. 

Another difference is that while SecretPrices focuses on a more formal website look and feel, BaeBo uses Ajax and newer technologies…  Its cool, but clumsy and messy (espeically in IE).  That seems to be the trend with these Web 2.0 mashups… As I tend to agree with Pete Cashmore, who states “it seems like all these mashups are merging into one homogeneous lump. Some of them are cool to play around with, but within a few days they’re forgotten” in his blog about BaeBo.  The basic mentality seems to be: “I’m going to do this because its cool and I can!”  Not a very good business model.

Read more »

Technorati Tags: Amazon, e-commerce, A9, Opensearch, Yahoo, Shopping, Shopping.com, regular expressions, Ajax, Web 2.0, mashup

Have you heard of AlexaDex?  This doesn’t exactly have to do with online shopping, but I thought it was a notable site utilizing Amazon Web Services.  Similiar in idea to Smarkets this is a stock market like environment where you can buy and sell shares.  The difference is that you can buy and sell shares of web sites rather than Amazon products.  Instead of the Amazon ECS it uses Alexa web services.

It’s really very addicting… So on second thought, don’t check it out if you are easily addicted to simple online games!

Technorati Tags: Amazon, Web Services, Smarkets, Alexa

Have you used Shopping.com?  It has a lot of good pricing information on a variety of products. And the reviews imported from ePinions can also be very helpful in making a purchase decision.  However, the biggest draw back is the lack of critical product information- specifically in Movies, Music and Books categories.

For example, lets look at Batman Begins. The very first offer description is “UPC: 01256959414″. Well lets be realistic, that UPC means nothing to me. In order to figure out what format, and edition it is I would normally go Google the UPC. The next offer description is “Format: DVD, UPC: 01256959414″. That’s the same UPC. So now I know that its a DVD. But thats as much information as I’ll get aside from Condition information. So I’m likely to just find the lowest price and click it… Not knowing what edition or version I am going to get.

What we did with SecretPrices.com to fix this is call upon Amazon Web Services to bring in that lacking information. As you can see the Batman Begins listing at SecretPrices.com shows Format, Edition and various format attribute information. And for collectors looking for that special Two-Disc Deluxe Edition with Comic Book, they can find it much easier than scanning UPC #s.

Why wouldn’t Shopping.com provide this information. Well, it is possible they don’t have the information… Or maybe they want you to click through and find the information yourself (they’ll make money). Brian Smith at ComparisonEngines.com states in this post “a lot of the engines have been set up to monetize the user as much as possible either through driving clicks to multiple merchants or through driving sponsored link (Adwords ads) clicks. Why educate the user if you can make money by getting rid of the user as quickly as possible?”

That may shed some light onto why there is so much information lacking from their pricing comparison site. But looking at the long-run its not a good business model. Providing less information to the end-user will ultimately end up in frustration and dissastifacation in the service as a whole.  Thats my stance…

Part II will discuss the implementation of eBay items (coming soon).

Technorati Tags: shopping comparison, shopping.com, amazon, ebay, web services, web2.0,  batman begins

I have been reading up on the A9.com OpenSearch.  While I haven’t used the A9 search much to date, it seems like it has great potential…  Letting the users choose which search facilities to use, when they want.  For example, you can have one column be Web Results and another be Price Comparison or Shopping results.  Or if you are looking for a Book by a certain author, one column could be book results, while another is Images of the Author… Its all up to you.

So I have added the SecretPrices.com comparison shopping search engine to A9 OpenSearch.  You test it out by clicking here to choose your A9 OpenSearch columns and then by typing in “secret” in the textbox that says “type here to find columns”.

It seems the right thing to do as it will be incorporated in IE7 (beta 2)… Nathan Weinberg states “The IE team says they are working with Amazon to support OpenSearch in IE7, letting users populate IE with oodles of search engines” in his article.

The greatness that lies within the concept is that any more search aggregators can utilize it once it has been setup.  Of course I am sure there is licensing issues and such for usage, but thats another story.

More reading about IE7 and A9:
Behind the Scenes at Microsoft, A9, and Amazon (AWS Blog)
Microsoft IE7 + A9 Opensearch - a marriage made in Open heaven (panlibus at Tails.com)

Technorati Tags: OpenSearch, A9, comparison shopping, Amazon, IE7

I’ll be attending the Affiliate Summit this year for the first time… Although I believe last year was the first time it existed so I won’t feel like too much of a newb.  I was just in Las Vegas celebrating New Years, but I am not concerned as it will be exciting to go back again… I mean, cmon, its Vegas.  Maybe I can win back some of the money I lost.

Anyway, I just wanted to do a quickpost to announce that I’ll be at Affiliate Summit (which is apparently sold out)… Drop me a comment if you are attending.

Testing out the SimpleTags plugin that I just downloaded.  Should appear below… 

Technorati Tags: affiliate, affiliate summit, las vegas, conference

I have been following Chitika, which seems to be based on the Shopping.com API, for the last several months.  The concept of it is very interesting, and you haven’t heard of it, read about it here.

They have recently had trouble with their Audits, namely delays and crediting users with revenue.  As the delays grow longer, more of its userbase is losing faith.  Many bloggers are speculating that they are being ripped off.  Darren Rowse (aka ProBlogger) who seems to be in tight with Chitika states that the reason Chitika audits disregarded revenue “so heavily was primarily for reasons of traffic from non accepted countries”.  Darren has yet to say anything really negative about Chitika, and helps keep their hype alive…  So many are skeptical that he might have deeper ties than meets the eye…  Read more »