Shopping.com Partners Resource Center Developer Blog

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.