Shopping.com Partners Resource Center Developer Blog

The Shopping.com Widget Program, which provided users with a plug-in solution for displaying Shopping.com Content on their pages with little development effort, will be shut down during the week of January 4th, 2010. At that time, all remaining Widgets will begin displaying a static Shopping.com flash ad, and clicks on the ad will link directly to the Shopping.com home page.  Partners will continue to be paid for any merchant leads generated by visitors who have clicked through the ad to Shopping.com.

If you would like to replace the Shopping.com Widgets with more dynamic content, the Shopping.com API will remain available for those partners with the ability to integrate it.  More documentation about the API can be found at:

• http://developer.shopping.com/docs
• http://developer.shopping.com/docs/Getting_Started
• http://developer.shopping.com/docs/API_Use_Cases

If you are interested in using the Shopping.com API, you will need to apply for access if you have not already.

After a year long migration period, the Shopping.com API version 2 is no longer officially supported as of October 1st 2009.  The servers are in the process of being decommissioned, and service levels will degrade over the coming weeks.  If you have not yet migrated to API version 3, you will need to do so immediately in order to maintain service to your users. 

Please see the API Use Cases documentation for example API version 3 requests.

I've been hearing a lot of confusion around products and offers as defined by SDC.  I'll try to explain the difference here, as well as the role of each within the SDC catalog...

The concept of a product within SDC is an entity sort of like a 'shell' around a group of offers, allowing comparison of offers for identical items from different stores. This shell also acts as an anchor to which we can attach things like reviews, specs, images, etc.

SDC has three types of categories based around this 'product' entity. Those where all offers are associated w/ products, or "productized" (e.g. Digital Cameras), those where some offers are associated with products, while others are not, or "soft productized" (e.g. Shoes), and those where no offers are associated with products, or "non-productized" (e.g. Clothing).

Productized categories generally contain items with unique IDs (UPCs, MPNs, etc.) where it is very simple to match each offer to a product. Soft Productized categories generally contain items which may not have unique IDs, yet many stores sell the same exact thing, and so some softer matching rules are needed (which aren't always able to match every offer to a product.) Non-productized categories generally contain items which are mainly sold by a single store, so products are not necessary, as each one would only have a single offer.

In general, I recommed you think of every category as soft productized or 'hybrid', as it is the superset of the other two (the API was designed with this philosophy.)  However, if you really want to distinguish between the three, the API provides a 'contentType' element for each returned category, indicating the mix of products and offers ('products', 'offers', or 'hybrid'.)

UPDATE: Please note the following instructions differ from a previous post.

Shopping.com will be separating US and EU API traffic to separate datacenters next week. In order to do this, we will need partners to update the domains/IPs to which they are sending traffic.

API2 Users currently sending traffic to 'api.shopping.com':

We are requesting that all users with sites targeting US and Australian markets begin sending traffic to 'usb.api.shopping.com' instead.  Similarly all users with sites targeting European markets begin sending traffic to 'api.i18n.shopping.com'. 

API3 Users:

We are requesting that all users with sites targeting US/Australian markets send their traffic to 'publisher.usb.api.shopping.com'.  All users with sites targeting European markets are requested to send their traffic to 'publisher.usa.api.shopping.com'.

Shopping.com will be updating the 'api.shopping.com' and 'publisher.api.shopping.com' domains on April 14th, at which time you may see a significant performance degradation if you have not made the above change.  Please make sure to also clear any DNS caches or update hard-coded DNS host files if necessary.

Thanks,

The Shopping.com Partner Team

Hi Partners,

The Partner Account Center is currently experiencing data backlog. Please note that while you will still have access to your account, reports will not be current but PAC reports will be retroactively updated by Thursday morning.

We apologize for the inconvenience and we thank you for your patience. If you have any questions, please contact partnersus@shopping.com.

Regards,

Shopping.com Partners Management

January 2009 top product list is now posted! Use this information to see what's hot on Shopping.com and use this knowledge to optimize your campaigns!

 http://developer.shopping.com/page/jan09topproducts

     With the holiday season is approaching, Shopping.com anticipates an increase in traffic and sales.  One of Shopping.com's on-going efforts is to maintain our performance-based pricing model ensuring merchant selection while remaining competitive within the industry.

Here are the details of our holiday pricing changes which will be in place from November 15^th to December 31^st :

• We will apply a 15% decrease to the standard CPCs in over 25 categories including GPS devices, MP3 players, video games, flat panel televisions and musical instruments. To see the full list categories affected by the decrease, click here.
• Shopping.com is not raising the standard CPCs for over 160 categories including all other electronics, computers and video game categories. To see the full list of categories with no CPC changes, click here.
• An increase of 20% will be applied to other categories like Clothing, Home and Garden, Kids and Family, Jewelry and Watches--an increase that we believe is extremely competitive in the comparison shopping industry. For a full list of categories affected, click here.

Let us know if you have any questions about these changes!

Thanks,

Shopping.com Partner Team

That's right...  Search by Offer ID is now available in API v3!  You can now recall not only individual products, but specific offers as well, allowing you to provide bookmarking or wishlist functionality for your users, or create cross-category promotional listings.  More information on how to use this new feature can be found here.

Stay tuned - more of the features you have been requesting will be available soon!