Shopping.com Partners Resource Center Developer Blog

Last week we released two product updates for the Shopping.com Partner Network.

Product Reports:

In response to recent feedback we’ve enhanced our product reports within the Partner Account Center. We've added several new features to help partners better optimize their implementations.

The new features included in the reports are:
Filter by date: You can now run reports by specific dates or by month. Download daily reports by placement.
Filter by placement: You can run a report summary to view aggregate data or run the report by placement.
Download up to 60,000 products: Easily access a list of your top 100 products online or download a report to view up to 60,000 products.
Reports can be downloaded in .csv, .txt or .xml formats.

Partner Account Center – Australia

We have just launched the Partner Account Center for Australia. Publishers with websites targeted to Australian users can now enroll online in the Shopping.com AU Partner Program. We are excited to have Shopping.com Partner Programs available in the US, France, Germany, Great Britain and Australia!

Like many Internet users today, you probably share your photos on Flickr; videos on YouTube; movie recommendations on Netflix; personal profiles on Facebook and MySpace; professional profiles on LinkedIn; and likes and dislikes about products and services on various sites including Epinions (a business of Shopping.com). The list goes on.

The social networking phenomenon has inspired the professorial types to write research papers and books. There is this theory about the Wisdom of the Crowds (how people as a group can make a better decision than individuals). Chris Anderson is now famous for his observations about the Long Tail, which among others discusses how much easier it is for people of similar passions to find niche products and services.

The more practical types like the folks at Next Generation Shopping, a Shopping.com API partner, write applications that take advantage of this phenomenon and the opening of the Facebook platform. They recently released a social shopping application on the Facebook platform dubbed My Shopping. The application was introduced via their shopping portal SecretPrices.com with plans of integrating portions of the site’s functionality in the future. The application seems to be getting a good buzz from bloggers around the world, and the adoption rate is growing fast.

MyShopping on Facebook is a new approach on collaborative filtering, which is a fancy term for using the opinions of like-minded buyers to recommend products to purchase. Traditionally, giant retail sites such as Amazon.com are the mediator of such decisions, by mining their massive sales data to come up with recommendations that are based on purchases by similar people, not necessarily known by you. MyShopping on Facebook takes the collaborative recommendation process into the hands of the individuals and their friends.

Here’s what it claims: “The application allows users to shop online with their Facebook friends. Anyone can search for books, music, movies, gadgets, clothing, or anything you have a need for. They can then rate, mark, and share items. For any item, a user can view how many of their friends like or dislike that item, as well as compare the lowest prices available from retail stores.”

Even better, the same friends can also make money in the process, since the items featured are based on merchant listings from online advertising networks such as Shopping.com. Obviously Next Generation Shopping wants to get a share of this advertising revenue. This is the kind of application that Facebook hoped to attract when it opened its platform back in May 2007. Shopping recommendations by friends will attract more members to Facebook’s customer base, and having more members means higher advertising rates.

Let the friendly and profitable shopping begin!

In my last post, I talked about the SDC API - where it came from, and what it provides today. The SDC API is the industry leader and is currently helping hundreds of our Partners to better monetize their site. But we think we can make it even better!

We've been gathering Partner feedback over the years, listening to what you like, what you don't like, and what could be made easier. We've taken this feedback, and designed an entirely new interface, with simplicity, consistency, configurability, and ease of use in mind. This interface will become the core of a new and improved API, which will bring with it web service standards compliance, increased stability (already at 99.9% uptime,) as well as tools for faster implementations, such as Software Development Kits, Schemas/WSDLs, and all the documentation you could want.

But, all these new features come at a cost. A new interface means our Partners will need to re-implement the parts of their code which communicate with the SDC API. While we think these changes can be made without too much difficulty, we are fully aware that implementation times can be vastly different between Partners, due to schedules, development team sizes, as well as site design. In response, we plan on maintaining availability of our current API for 1 full year beyond the launch of a functionally equivalent new API. Currently, we are planning on an initial release with partial functionality in Q3 '07, and a final release with complete functionality in the first half of '08. This means the current API will be available until at least Q1 '09.

I'd like to end this post with an encouragement for feedback. We really do want a discussion here, as the SDC API is, and will be, all about providing what our Partners need. In the future, I will be providing more detail, including the XML Schemas, but in the short term I'd like to hear your thoughts on the direction we're taking, as well as continued feedback on the current API.

Thanks!

We are excited to announce that category reports were launched last week in the Partner Account Center (PAC)! Partners can now track leads and revenue by category and subcategory. Reports can be run by day or month across all categories or for one specific category. These reports will help Partners gain more insight into their API and Shop Widget implementations to determine which categories are working best for them and which need to be optimized. This is just one of many product enhancements we have in store for our partner program this year. Our goal is to provide partners the tools they need to monetize their sites and grow successful partnerships. Check out the reports in PAC and let us know what you think!

On June 11-13, the Shopping.com partner network team participated in the eBay Developer Conference in Boston. Our head of business development Josh Wetzel, Shopping.com Partner Network manager Ryan Dugan, product managers Isha Bhatt and Wens Gerdyman, and senior marketing manager Joe Dew were there to meet and greet the developers and partners in person.

Over 800 developers came to the conference, and quite a few stopped by the Shopping.com table to share their interests and voice their inputs. Many of you came to see Ryan Dugan’s presentation on How to Make Money with Shopping.com. We appreciate your attendance, and hope you were able to get as much out of the experience as we did.

We were excited that Shopwave, a website built by Shopping.com partner mpire.com, won the eBay Star Developer award for Best User Experience Design. Shopwave is a Flash-based service designed to give online buyers the ability to visually and virtually window shop.

Marc Mezzacca from Next Generation Shopping stopped by to show us his progress with an exciting application built on top of Shopping.com API that has a great potential to monetize social networking. Needless to say we were quite impressed and will stay tuned to hear more from Marc.

We spent some time exchanging ideas and comparison shopping market data with the guys from winbuyer.com, which is innovating on the SDC API. We realize that part of the experience of the eBay Developer Conference is learning from our partners, and that's exactly what we did with Miki and Alon.

On the merchant side, Joe Palko and John Fallon of Solid Cactus showed off their new product, FeedPerfect, which helps merchants post their listings automatically across comparison shopping engines, including Shopping.com. In addition to feed services, the FeedPerfect product also helps merchants analyze SKU performance and bidding across different shopping engines. These folks work with a lot of Yahoo! stores but would love to work with any online stores big and small. They are also contemplating building a Shopping.com API integration so that complementary product listings can appear on their clients’ online stores. Stay tuned to hear more about this in a later blog.

Trend wise, we heard of some interesting services being developed for contextual search. Fundamentally, this kind of technology tries to determine the content of a web page and generate the right query terms or keywords that would return relevant ad units. This has a lot of promise in increasing the relevance and monetization rate of ads on one’s website. James Oppenheim shared a little bit about the latest progress that his startup peer39 has made in this area in relation with the Shopping.com API.

Finally, as we mentioned both in the presentation, and in one-on-one discussions with many of you, we are looking for creative developers to help us distribute our listings even more easily, by developing widgets on top of our API platform. Shopping.com does have its own Shop Widgets, (i.e., pre-designed HTML ad units that can be inserted into a web page), but we would love to see innovative and interactive alternatives offered by our partners.

It was really fun to see all of you, and hope to see even more of you next year. In the meantime, we'll continue to use this site to communicate news and updates. If you have any good ideas, or feedback in general, please don’t hesitate to comment, or sign up as a partner if you have not already.

The Shopping.com team is in Boston this week at eBay 6th Annual Developer's Conference. Look for updates and/or reach out to the team if you're in the Boston area to say hello. You can read regular updates on the eBay Developers Blog.

If they keynotes were any indication, its going to be a great conference!

Hello, and welcome to the Shopping.com Partner Network. My name is Ryan, and you will be hearing quite a bit from me in the future as I will be working with the Shopping.com community of Partners to provide information, answer questions, and generally act as a community lead, especially around technical subjects. As mentioned in the previous post, we'd like to use this site to create an open dialogue with you, our Partners, and I'd like to begin that dialogue with a discussion on the flagship of our Partner facing products, the Shopping.com API.

Many of you may not realize this, but the SDC API is actually an evolution of one of the first 'search listing' type CPC ad networks. Initially released in mid-2002, the precursor to today’s API was called the DealTime 'MagicBox'. Its main purpose was to serve snippets of Javascript code which rendered predesigned HTML containing SDC data, including store offers. Calls to this service were embedded in Partners websites, resulting in 'Magic Boxes' of SDC product and offer data appearing on their pages.

The service is quite useful, and is still in existence today, in the form of the Shop Widgets program (check them out in the Partner Account Center.) For simplicity and an extremely quick time to launch, the Shop Widget solution can't be beat. A Partner can have SDC content in the form of banner or tower ads up on their site within minutes.

However, some of our Partners wanted more, from different designs, to more data, to more engaging experiences. As a result, and through countless hours of cooperation with our Partners, we've pieced together the SDC API as you see it today - a REST type service which produces XML allowing for complete freedom of presentation, while allowing access to almost every piece of information available on our own site. If you think you could use the SDC API, or already are and just want more info, check out the API Documentation.

In my next post, I will be talking about the future of the SDC API. In the meantime, we'd love to use this venue to get your thoughts on the API, both in terms of what is working well, and what could be made easier.

Stay tuned!

This blog is part of a larger effort by the Shopping.com team to create an open dialogue with developers, partners & folks interested in the evolution and growth of product commerce. The blog is just one part of our Partner Network – we’ll also introduce a forum for discussion topics and/or threads of the community’s choice and a knowledge base to research and learn how the Shopping.com Partner Network tools work. This is an important milestone for the Partner Program at Shopping.com which has been around since 2000. We’re excited to further build a community around a business that has proven very valuable for both Partners and Shopping.com.

Our goal is to build two-way communication on such topics as product announcements, release notes, partner examples and much more. Partners have surprised us with their ingenuity and creativity leveraging Shopping.com assets to expand their respective businesses, and we want to highlight these while creating a place where the creation of ideas and the socialization of what’s new are forefront. These discussions are meant to be conversation starters that will inevitably lead us all to new ideas.

If you have questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to let us know. We are looking forward to hearing from you.

Thanks!