I’ve been looking into what the future holds for structured formats (MicroFormats) recently, mainly hReview, as I see it has great potential to enhance consumer shoppers’ ability to increase efficiency in researching. Yahoo! Tech just announced that their site supports the hReview format. While I continued my research of the hReview format, I began to wonder… Why not a MicroFormat for products?

As Brian Smith of ComparisonEngines.com probably knows well, merchants sites generally have to create different feeds for each comparison engine they wish to list on, in order to adapt to the engine specifications. Aggregator sites that crawl such as Froogle, Yahoo! Shopping and now ShopWiki, require algorithms to correctly identify products. And while great strides have been taken to increase accuracy, they are still not accurate enough for the ever more demanding online consumer. A structured format would allow both to more easily gather information.

At least the basics would help greatly:

• Product Title
• Price
• Description
• SKU (if available)
• MFG Part # (if available)
• UPC (important, if available)

And other attributes such as inventory stock, shipping, etc. could come later. Of course I realize there are a lot of potential obstacles in the variation between product groups and how merchants organize their own internal databases.

Thoughts?

[tags]microformats, hreviews, structured formats, e-commerce[/tags]