Next Generation Shopping

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.

Shopzilla / BizRate
Affiliate Program: Yes | Co-branding: Yes* | API / Web Service: No
Seems like they want only high traffic sites for partners. They do have “Contextual e-commerce links for your website.”

For BizRate,
They have cobranding opportunities, but I have seen no web service/API from them eithier. Some useful links: Partner Home, FAQ, Apply to Partner Program.

* Bizrate allows for co-branding, haven’t seen it for Shopzilla.

Yahoo! Shopping
Affiliate Program: No | Co-branding: No | API / Web Service: Yes
Yahoo! released an API in 2005. This is the most informational comparison shopping API I have seen. And probably has the most potential, given the Yahoo! developer community. But last I checked it was limited to 5,000 API calls a day. That essentially renders it uesless for any large projects.

While they have announced revenue sharing for Yahoo! Shoposphere (read more from the stories in November at TechCrunch and Mashable), I am suprised they don’t have a revenue share program for Yahoo! Shopping… Yahoo! please enable more calls and revenue sharing… Who wants to create something of value with no revenue share?

MSN Shopping
Affiliate Program: No | Co-branding: No | API / Web Service: No
No affiliate program… No shopping web services… As of right now… However, I have heard from a Microsoft Rep at Affiliate Summit they are working on a beta API / Web Service and also an affiliate program (read more about it here from the Conference Who’s Who site). Should be interesting.

Froogle
Affiliate Program: No | Co-branding: No | API / Web Service: No
With all the open source and progress Google is making, I am suprised we haven’t seen more action out of Froogle. Listing product information is free for merchants, so I don’t expect to see an affiliate program from them… Nor do I expect one as they pretty much have all the traffic they need. To me it would make sense to release an API that would allow other sites to help feed in product information from merchants and also utilize the information. The other Google APIs have been, for all intensive purposes, a success. So why not one for Froogle?

Perhaps Google has something big on the way. Dave Taylor puts the pieces together in his article Next up: Google Shopping?. He formulates a simple equation:

Froogle + Google Base = Google Shopping

He discusses the Google Base briefly. The only problem I see is that since it is free, you will get a lot more junk information being pushed in by those who are looking to make money of some kind scheme.

Technorati Tags: Shopping.com, PriceGrabber, NexTag, Shopzilla, MSN Shopping, Froogle, affiliate, price comparison, shopping comparison, Chitika, eMiniMall, web services, API, Google, revenue share, pay-per-click

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