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DevCon Session: Monetizing Publisher Traffic with Shopping.Com
Posted by
Adam Trachtenberg
in Developers Conference
Monday, Jun.16.2008, 2:08 PM PT
I just got out of Monetizing Publisher Traffic with Shopping.Com, where Shopping.Com's own Ryan Dugan spoke about their wide range of affiliate developer opportunities.
Shopping.Com helps consumers find the top items on the Web. It's basically like eBay, but where eBay operates best for rare or unique items, Shopping.Com's sweet spot is for easy-to-find items, such as video game consoles and flat panel TVs.
Since I work at eBay, I'd known about Shopping.Com before the session, but I didn't know how large they were. Shopping.Com has 97% of the top 100 online retailers, which works out to 6,000+ paying merchants.
With so many items, you need structure. That's why Shopping.Com has put together the world's most complete product catalog. They then combine that with lexical and behavioral relevance algorithms to make a fantastic finding experience.
For example, if you search for "D70," Shopping.Com uses its lexical relevance engine to look up products in their catalog, such as JVC Camcorder GR-D70, Nikon Digital SLR Camera D70s, and Batteries for D70s Camera (MS-D70). They then run their behavioral filters to see that when people search for "D70," 85% of people want digital camera, 8% want accessories, 8% want other things. That all combines seamless on the backend to have Shopping.Com "know" that when someone types in "D70," there is a very high likelihood they want to see a Nikon D70 Camera, so they can automatically select that option.
Results are then combined with 1.8 million very detailed Epinions product reviews, which allows people to get high quality information about each product.
All this data — the catalogs, offers, and reviews — are available for free via Shopping.Com's APIs. Full details are at http://developer.shopping.com.
Developers can use their APIs to make money as affiliates. When they're successful, affiliates get paid a share of Shopping.Com's revenue. With the API, you get all the logic and information from Shopping.Com, but you provide the presentation to create the application. Most developers create one of four different types of applications: search integration, full shopping channels, tailored shopping experiences, and ad units.
On the product side, Shopping.Com launched a beta of the 3rd version of their APIs in March. It offers a better interface that's easier to use, a category tree API, an XML schema, Java SDK, SOAP support, and documentation. So far, developer feedback has been quite positive, as this is a large improvement over the current version.
Now I’m off to the next session, where Paul Pantera will discuss the all nitty-gritty details of their API in Technical Integration of Shopping.Com API .
