Shopping.com Publisher API Glossary

# A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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Attribute

An property used to group/filter items in the Shopping.com catalog, such as 'Color' or 'Brand'. An attribute value is a specific instance of an attribute, such as 'red' or 'Sony', and these values are what users actually select to narrow result sets.

Not all attributes apply to all type of items. For example, items within both the Clothing and Digital Cameras category will have values for the attribute 'Brand', but only Clothing items will have values for the 'Material' attribute, while only Digital Cameras will have values for the attribute 'Resolution'.

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Featured Store

Featured Stores are stores that have paid for placement. In addition the following criteria must be met:

1. Store rating is above 2.75 stars
2. Offer is in stock
3. Store has provided tax and shipping information for the offer (only included in the price if a postal code has been provided in the API request.)

When sorting offers by 'featured-store' beneath a product, the first N offers (if N offers meet all the criteria - N determined by the API request, or 3 by default) will be sorted by the stores bid, followed by the Smart Buy offer (if one exists), followed by any remaining offers sorted by price.

When sorting offers by 'featured-store' at the category level (not attached to products), the first N offers will be sorted by yield (relevance x store bid), followed by any remaining offers sorted purely by relevance.

Form

Another name for a category.  Form is often used when talking about leaf level categories.

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Item

In the context of the API, an Item is either a product or offer at the category level. This excludes offers beneath products.

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Leaf Level Category

A category in the Shopping.com category tree which contains no child categories, but instead contains items. Examples include 'Digital Cameras' or 'Shoes'.

Linkin ID

Another (older) name for Tracking ID.

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Merchant

Another name for a store, i.e. someone who provides Shopping.com with offer listings.

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Normalization

The process of modifying a search phrase to create a more easily searchable phrase. Includes such steps as spell checking, tokenization, and stemming.

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Offer

An entity in the Shopping.com catalog representing a specific item offered by a single store at a given price. Offers come in two flavors - those mapped to products, or those not mapped, falling directly under a given category.  Offers may often be referred to as SKUs.

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Parent Level Category

A category in the Shopping.com category tree which contains no items, but instead contains other parent level or leaf level categories. Examples include 'Electronics' or 'Home and Garden'.

Product

An entity in the Shopping.com catalog representing a real-world item which may be sold by multiple vendors. Products have names, descriptions, attributes (dimensions, weight, etc.) and sometimes IDs (e.g. MPN, UPC) which remain the same regardless of the vendor. Multiple offers may be grouped under a single product.

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Query

A single request to the Shopping.com API.

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Relevance Threshold

A limit in the Shopping.com search engine beyond which categories or products are generally filtered from results, under the assumption that users are most likely not interested in them. For example, when searching for the keyword 'house', the Shopping.com search engine will actually find results in hundreds of categories, but will return only (up to) 10 or so, as the majority of results are found within that limited set of categories. This behavior is intended to make the results more manageable for the end user, and can be disabled if required.

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Skipping

A Shopping.com search engine feature which tries to determine the actual intent behind the users query, rather than simply returning all possible results for the query. If the search engine determines that the majority of results matching a search phrase are contained within a single category or product, it will return only the items within that category, or offers for that product, rather than a result set containing items across multiple categories.

SKU

A synonym for offer.

Smart Buy

A Shopping.com label provided to the lowest priced offer from a trusted store within a list of offers for a specific product. Additionally, the following criteria must be met:

1. Offer is in-stock.
2. Store has provided tax and shipping information for the offer (only included in the price if a postal code has been provided in the API request.)
3. Offer is not used or refurbished.

Soft Productization

A feature which clusters apparently related offers into groups under products which are automatically created from data mined from those offers. This technology is mainly applied in 'soft goods' categories, i.e. those categories containing items like shoes or fragrances, for which no universal product code is available.

Spelling Correction

The process of changing a word (or words) from their original form as entered by the user, to a proper spelling determined by consulting a dictionary and/or past behavioral data, e.g. from 'camura' to 'camera'. One of the many keyword normalization steps.

Stemming

The process of reducing a word to its root version, e.g. from 'cameras' to 'camera'. One of the many keyword normalization steps.

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Taxonomy

Another name for 'category tree' - the hierarchy of Shopping.com categories.

Tokenization

The process of splitting a word along boundaries (letter to number, special character, etc.), e.g. from 'canon sd1000' to 'canon sd 1000'. One of the many keyword normalization steps.

Tracking ID

SDC generated ID used for API access and revenue tracking at the campaign (placement) level.  This ID will be provided through the Partner Account Center when you sign up for the API.  Previously known as 'Linkin ID'.

Trusted Store

A Shopping.com label provided to stores who meet the following criteria:

1. Consistently receive positive customer ratings and reviews.
2. Provide accurate price, shipping, and availability information.
3. Provide basic store information including store address.
4. Must note when products are used or refurbished.
5. Must be listed on Shopping.com for at least one year.
6. Honor prices listed on their site without excuses.
7. Resolve customer service complaints quickly and fairly.