MicroFormats for Reviews, What about Products?
Comments(4) 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]
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There has been discussion of this already on the microformats forum: http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2006-March/003237.html
I don’t see microformats being useful to individuals and mid to large size companies with lots of product data would just spit out xml in a variety of schemas.
Great idea! One addition item on this wish list would be to add the URL for the product image. While images may not be critical for the comparison shopping staples like electronics and computers, they are absolutely essential for all of the “soft goods” categories like clothing, furnishings, shoes, luggage, jewelry and such.
Mike- Thanks for the feedback and discussion link. Some good points.
But why then are companies still crawling results and getting them wrong?
I’m not certain if you were talking about microformats in general or just the idea of a product-based microformats on the individual level, but I believe the hReview format may eventually prove useful not only for bloggers getting exposure for their reviews, but pairing the of products to reviews from around the Web.
Siva- Great input about “soft products”, which are often difficult to match together.
While I mostly agree with Mike and what was discussed in the mailing list, I doubt there’s any harm in trying to get e-commerce site owners to come to an agreement on a pretty miniminal schema and just have scripts to interface with the different product providers to fill in the info. After a while I think the industry would start feeling the pressure to provide compliant feeds if they don’t want to be left out but either way somewhere down the road I think that could make the basis for a microformat that would definitely plug in to a lot of hreviews and such.