Next Generation Shopping

A new product was recently released by Amazon to its Associates network. The product allows less technical associates to easily create an entire online store using the extensive Amazon catalog. Amazon claims that “No programming is necessary” for usage of this new utility. It comes built in with a shopping cart, and the users are only taken to Amazon for final checkout.

From the Amazon Associates area:

“aStore by Amazon is a new Associates product that gives you the power to create a professional online store, in minutes and without the need for programming skills, that can be embedded within or linked to from your website.”

Some of the capabilities include: Ability to Feature Certain Amazon Products and Ability to Show Product Details, Reviews, and Pricing Information. Associates can find more information and read the full details next time they login to the Amazon Associate Area.  Although tons of Amazon Associate sites already exist, this should be ideal for niche sites featuring specific products.

Technorati Tags: Amazon, Amazon.com, Amazon Web Services, Amazon Associates, aStore, E-Commerce

Jeff Barr over at the AWS Blog has posted a very nice writeup about SecretPrices.com and the Amazon perspective…

“True to the site’s name, there’s a list of secret deals and also a so-called “tag cloud” of coupons. You can post any product to Digg or to Delicio.us.

Interestingly enough, Mark told me that the lowest priced vendor doesn’t always get the sale. There’s a strong preference toward Amazon among his user base. That’s good to hear, and there are undoubtedly many reasons for this. I’ll take a guess at a few. First, people are loathe to create yet another online account. Second, they would like to deal with a known entity where possible. Third, they have probably had some positive experiences with Amazon in the past — an easy shopping and buying experience, on-time shipping, and responsive customer service…”

Take a minute and read the full post over at the AWS Blog.

Technorati Tags: aws, amazon web services, secretprices, brand loyalty

John Musser of ProgrammableWeb.com has posted some of the Best New Mashups that utilize the Amazon API. Worth taking a minute to check-out these innovations.

Amongst them listed is Frucall, a free phone service that allows in-store price comparison. See my older posts here and here about the service.

Technorati Tags: frucall, amazon api, amazon web services

My brother thoroughly enjoys picking apart the flaws of the Internet. We often don’t really see eye-to-eye on a wide-range of topics, but this time he has written a piece that has caught my attention for sure. It is on the pitfalls of microformats being used in conjunction with web services incorrectly, or should I say what is seemingly unethical. Straight from the DisconnectTheDots blog:

“It appears that this deals site is using hReview markup in their product pages and getting indexed in the Reviews section of Technorati’s fairly new Microformats Search. I would say that this looks like quite a nice site normally. Unfortunately, the issue is that they use the Amazon.com API for data (as do many) and the way they’ve marked it up, all they do is round up Amazon’s average rating for the product, use the title of the product to markup the name (item fn), attempt to have the amazon user reviews in the “description” field, sneak in the “type” field of product with an abbr near the bottom of the page, and have a link that just links back to Dealazon’s own product page” (Read Full Entry)

So basically, my take from his entry, and from what I see is that Dealazon is submitting Amazon user reviews to Technorati and passing them as their own? (See example here) Why? Free traffic I assume. Not sure if telling people about this is a good idea or not since most will do about anything to get more traffic these days! I knew that this could be done a while ago. Tech.yahoo.com uses its own web services and marks up user reviews in hReview format… So what is to stop other sites from doing the same?

Its tempting to me to test this and see what kind of traffic is gained from this type of activity. However, Shopping.com makes you markup the Epinions reviews in a certain fashion. Amazon and Yahoo! may eventually want to follow this method too.

The trouble in doing this is duplicate content being submitted to aggregators. Duplicate content with no value-added is looked down upon by the majority of the Internet community and rightly so. It is not practical and not effeicient.

So those of you interested in structured blogging, I’ll let you decide. Is this an ethical practice for an affiliate or should the link always be back to the main review source?

Technorati Tags: technorati, pingerati, dealazon, reviews, hreviews, microformats, structured blogging, dulicate content, amazon, web services

There has been several new mashups using the Amazon ECS recently.

Here are some of them (information from ProgrammableWeb):

• The Amazing Baconizer
  Connecting a million popular culture dots via the Amazon API. Describe two items and see how they’re linked by consumer preference via intermediate items. Choose from books, CDs, or films, and you can mix and match.
• ActorTracker
  ActorTracker takes feeds of upcoming television shows, movies and celebrity news combined into a shopping experience with merchandise from Amazon and eBay.
• AmazonHive
  Alternative interface into the Amazon catalog. Java applet with price sliders and other filtering tools.

I haven’t had much time yet, but will look into them over the next few weeks. You can view all mashups that utilize the Amazon API listed in the ProgrammableWeb database here.

For developers .NET developers, you can jump start mashup development with the AmazonCommerceService.NET by Ed Quinn. More information from a recent post by Jeff Barr…

“AmazonCommerceService.NET is a set of .NET classes. It creates REST requests for ECS and then queues them up, dispatching them to Amazon at the rate of 1 request per second per the license agreement. The results are delivered asychronously as they arrive, using a delegate. Batched requests are supported.”

The source code is C# and framework is .NET 2.0. Also, Microsoft users can get the AmazonCommerceService.NET MSDN Compiled Help. For more information see Jeff’s his full post.

The last good ASP.NET implementation I saw was in a web application called StorePerfect for ECS 3.0, a few years ago. I will report further on this one once I have loaded the sample up and given it a whirl. My question to Ed, and maybe this is silly, but why was REST was choosen over SOAP?

Technorati Tags: ASP.NET, mashups, Amazon, Amazon ECS, Amazon Web Services

I check the blog traffic stats here every so often to see where people are coming from, and what they are searching for. One group of keywords imparticular caught my eye today. A user searching for Buy.com web services api. It makes me think: Why hasn’t Buy.com made any moves in this area yet? Its not like the technology just came out yesterday. Amazon has been offering web services for years, specifically their E-Commerce one. Web services are obviously working for Amazon… How many *illions of revenue are Amazon affiliates bringing in…?

Buy.com competes with Amazon in many areas, why not that one?  I mean I’m not saying there should be a duplicate of Amazon’s ECS, but be innovative! And personally I think I speak for all Buy.com affiliates in saying that downloading their enormous datafeed file from CJ is painful… No? Perhaps I will contact them and inquire about this.

Technorati Tags: Buy.com, web services, Amazon, e-commerce

Last Monday the winners of the AWS / Microsoft contest were announced.
The following criteria was used during the juding of the winners:

• Creativity
• AWS service integration
• Commercial appeal
• Fit and polish

The winners and the respective pages:

• Lucy Krasilshik - My 10 Wishes - $5000 Amazon Gift Certificate.
• Amit Gupta - Amazagames - MSDN Pro Subscription.
• Mathias Cianci - FeatFinder - $500 Amazon Gift Certificate.

I checked out the sites and there are some interesting ideas that utilize the AWS. I personally would have picked the third place winner over the first place winner… Not that I have anything against Santa.  Anyway, good to see Amazon continuing to fuel innovation, and great to see people using MS VS 2005!

For as long as I can remember, deal/bargain sites like DealCatcher, and comparison shopping sites, like PriceGrabber, remained separate entities. Being a true online bargain hunter meant monitoring deal sites like a cop visits Dunkin Donuts. Shopping comparison engines were only used when neccessary. Over time, as comparison engines matured, it became apparent how closely a match deal sites and shopping comparison sites were for each other. Every major deal site began to partner with a shopping comparison engine, namely PriceGrabber. See for yourself all the PriceGrabber co-brands that have popped up over the years… TechBargains, DealCatcher, Got|Apex, and numerous others, all have PriceGrabber co-brand partners.

While having a co-brand is a step up from completely sending your hard-earned visitor away from your site completely, it is still very limiting. For the first time, with the recent development of the e-commerce APIs and the Web 2.0 transition, the opportunity exists to blend the two, leaving the end-user, the consumer, relying on only one site.

Watch out deal sites, the future is here…

The original concept behind SecretPrices.com was to fully integrate deal and coupon information into price comparison listings to ensure the consumer knows how to receive the lowest price. While the technology is still in its infant stages, I am proud to announce we are one step closer to fully achieving this! Product deals whether as simple as a product price drop, or as complex as combing a collection of rebates, coupons, or other promotional discounts, have been integrated directly into the product page listings of SecretPrices.com (view deals section here).

An example “product deal” can be seen on the Hitachi MD6GB-BP 6 GB Hard Drive product page. First, take a minute and view this product on a Price Comparison engine (eg. Shopping.com or PriceGrabber)… You’ll see the lowest price from J&R, offering it for $169.99 on Shopping.com, and $159.99 from ZipZoomFly on PriceGrabber (not including StoreFront offerings). What it doesn’t tell you is that Dell is offering the same product for $179.99 with a $50 rebate. Oh yeah, and Dell also has a $20 coupon code until mid-April. Put the savings together and that is $70 off (dropping the price to about $110), a full $50 cheaper than the lowest price on a comparison engine listing. Doesn’t it give you a good feeling knowing all that?

How does the consumer benefit?

Comparison shopping is popular because it saves people time and effort from “site-hopping” to check prices. It’s no secret that savvy-bargain hunters still look further for coupons, rebates or other discounts. This means still having to site hop, producing extra work and extra time for the user. Read more »

Amazon recently launched a developer connection site that has:

“Lots and lots of developer-oriented information including code samples, technical documentation, and release notes, all organized on a per-service basis.”

It also features a community environment (discussion forums) and everything is RSS Syndicated so you do not have to constantly return to see whats new.

For more information, read Jeff Barr’s post or check out the developer connection.

Technorati Tags: Amazon, web services, developer, community

Well I am not really sure if I would classify this as a web service…

Jeff Barr over at Amazon had a blog post about a price comparison web service that I had never heard of.  It is called Price-Compare.net.  It seems very geared toward PHP / Amazon AWS developers.  Here is an example  of Mr. and Mrs. Smith comparison information from their custom PHP section. 

Anyway it offers a revenue share option that is Pay-Per-Sale % based rather than Pay-Per-Click (PPC).  Works with LinkShare, Commission Junction (CJ), eBay and Amazon. Interesting idea… I’ll be sure to look into it.

Revenue Sharing Fine Print

“Price-Compare.Net is allowed to withhold a percentage of any commissions earned or randomly substitute your network/affiliate id with one of its own.  The withholding amount and method of substitution can be changed after providing you with a 30 day notice via email or by posting a notice of change here.  The current rates are:
Date: Oct 1, 2005.  Withholding Rate: 20%.  Click Substitution Method: Each of your user clicks will generate a random number between 1 and 5.  If the number generated is 1 then a substitution will occur.”

The Price-Compare.net website itself didn’t look to appealing to me, and the number of stores returning information was not that many, but it is good to see some price comparison options for current affiliate marketers. 

It actually reminds me a lot of GoldenCan which is a service that allows affiliate websites to easily implement Merchant datafeeds and coupon data via a small JavaScript code.  GoldenCan is run by Asif Malik, who I met at Affiliate Summit 2006 (West).

Technorati Tags: Price Comparison, Affiliate,  Amazon, Amazon Web Service, LinkShare, Commission Junction, GoldenCan