Next Generation Shopping

“StumbleUpon Shopping” is what Nick Gonzalez of TechCrunch envisions after hearing of eBay’s recent acquisition of the social discovery service StumbleUpon.com.   This plays into the continued Web 2.0 trend of building a large userbase and waiting until you get bought out.  Of course, Stumble Upon offers much more than just a userbase, but is a good fit for eBay?  eBay has been criticized in the past for over stepping their vertical boundaries, specifically with the Skype acquisition.  However, they have molded their 3 majors (PayPal, Skype, Shopping.com) together very well thus far.  It will be hear the chatter about this recent StumbleUpon acquisition in the upcoming eBay Devcon.

Before jumping all over eBay, I’d recommend reading Scott Wingo’s very interesting analysis of the acquisition.

eBay DevCon 2007 is set for June 11 - 13 in Boston, Mass., only about three and a half weeks from now.  I’ll be in Boston from Friday, June 8th until the end of the conference if any developers (or anyone else) want to meetup and a grab a few drinks prior to the conference.

I’m not certain where I am staying as of yet.  And the eBay DevCon page doesn’t seem to have any information about hotel/travel accomodations.  However, eBay Live! does, so here is a link to that information.

If you haven’t already signed up you still have time.  I’d recommend it to those looking to work with eithier the eBay or Shoppping.com APIs.  Since you are a reader of this blog (and I like you), I’ll tell you that you can save 40% off the conference price by using the following special promotion code:

40% off Discount Code: 7DCAL1

Some sessions of interest on the Affiliate Traffic track are:

• Build a Shopping Portal
• Building eBay Mashups
• Make Money with Shopping.com APIs
• Content Tools for your Website

 You can contact me here if you are in Boston and wish to meet up.

Today I received notice “PriceRunner is pleased to offer qualified publishers access to its newly updated API Feed and Shopping Banner Widgets.”  I was obviously interested to know more about it, so I called their marketing manager directly.  A couple hours later their GM of PriceRunner US called me back to personally answer my questions.  Wow, impressive.  So here is what I got out of it…

PriceRunner has launched a competitve API service for web publishers in the shopping industry.  Apparently PriceRunner has had an API for about a year now (and I found this comment that dates back to September 2005). 

PriceRunner has sites in Sweden, France, Germany, UK, and the US.  They rank  #1 for shopping comparison in Sweden and Denmark, and near the top of other European countries.  You can become a partner to any of their sites via Commission Junction.

I have not yet played with the API, but I am told that it functions the same for all countries.  Since they cover a lot of countries this is very nice feature for expanding your own development outside the US.  Also another nice feature is there are no current restrictions on API calls. Read more »