The Yahoo! Developer Network announced today an update to the Yahoo! Shopping API:

“Based on developer feedback, Yahoo! Shopping has enhanced its APIs with a new browse navigation feature that helps consumers quickly narrow their product search by providing the user with a menu of sub-categories and product attributes to further refine their search results. A browse shopping experience with category and attribute based refinement can also be built, allowing users to drill down and obtain product results meeting their preferred product criteria.”

If you are a developer, you can jump right to the new (v2) Product Search features page to see for yourself all the new capabilities it allows for. It is great to see that developers are not only working with the API, but also providing quality feedback on it… Now if only some other comparison engines would learn from this (ehm ehm).

Speaking of which, I hope to hear back from Yahoo! soon about Yahoo! Shopping being integrated into its affiliate program. If they can compete with the Shopping.com (SDC) payout rates (which honestly I don’t think they will be able to), I think they will give SDC a run for their money (no pun intended) in the realm of API utilization by affiliate sites.

On another note, back in October 2005 Y! Shopping Web Services added user product review content from their system to the API, which was a great win for developers to be able to access that quality content… And oddly enough I just posted a comment on that blog entry late last night.

Thanks Brian for the heads up on this story.

[tags]Yahoo!, Shopping.com, web services, shopping, comparison shopping, API, REST, programming, developers, mashup[/tags]