Yahoo Shopping API: nearly right

Congrats, David, on being part of the first shopping service to publicly release an API. Looks pretty good from where I’m sitting – at least in comparison to your competition. Any plans to give back a little to the developers who use it? After all – unlike Yahoo Search, Yahoo Images, Yahoo News, and all the other APIs that are available out there – merchants are paying you directly on a cost-per-click basis for the traffic you send them. Looking at the rate card, I see some of those merchants are paying you up to a buck a click. Why not set up an affiliate program similar to Amazon’s? Remove the 5000-query-a-day limit, give the affiliate a percentage of the profits – surely less than what it costs to buy the traffic – and you’ll become the service of choice for anyone wanting to incorporate a little comparison shopping into their own websites and services. Set up a user-friendly program (again, think Amazon), set up some plugins for popular publishing platforms (hint: I use WordPress and Drupal) and you’ll gain a lot of share from your less-nimble competitors.