I see from Marketing VOX that NexTag, the comparison shopping site where I used to work, now has RSS feeds for its product searches. Do a search – any search – on NexTag, and you’ll see a little RSS icon at the very bottom of the footer allowing you to subscribe to the results. Very nice. I believe smaller folk like Dulance have offered this feature for a while but as far as I know NexTag is the first of the major comparison shopping sites to do so – Yahoo Shopping has a generic feed page but that’s about it.
Looking at these numbers from Neilsen/NetRatings, I see that NexTag lags Shopping.com and Shopzilla by over five million unique visitors a month. The real gap might not be as big as all that, depending on how and what Neilsen/NetRatings counts, but if I were NexTag – which I’m not – I would encourage and maybe even devote a small engineering team to develop other experimental features that their competitors don’t have. It’s good buzz (hey, RSS feeds got me to write about and link to NexTag – no need to thank me for the free SEO) and may just allow them to stumble across the next big thing in comparison shopping before your competitors. The first thing I’d have them do is build off that RSS to create an open API similar to Amazon’s, an API that’d allow developers to build applications using NexTag data in return for a share of the proceeds less than the cost of paid traffic acquisition. Then I’d encourage independent developers to use that API, and closely monitor the ideas they come up with for popularity – in effect letting the community do new product testing for you. There’s no need to fear being open with your data – when you’re third or fourth in a category, being open can only help.
If NexTag doesn’t want to open up a comprehensive API and combine it with a way of compensating the developers who use it, someone should. Yahoo Shopping’s limited and strictly-not-for-profit API hasn’t caught on because it’s limited and not-for-profit; I predict big things for the first company to open up.
