A comparison shopping site has finally combined enough guts and development time to release a set of APIs people can actually make a buck with. Light-years better than some lame cobrand, which is the standard comparison shopping site way of doing things. Congrats to Yahoo! Shopping and product manager David Beach.
Quick comments for Yahoo – first, get rid of the application process and open it up to the world as soon as possible. It should be as easy as AdSense to get started with. If you’re worried about the developers alienating your merchants with crap applications, allow the merchants to opt-out of partners not vetted by Yahoo – just like Google allows advertisers to opt-out of their publisher network. Next, tell us up front just how much we can make. Be like Amazon’s associate program – completely open about pricing. Give us confidence that we can make a buck, and we’ll come and make a buck.
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Thanks for the pointer. However, it should be noted that shopping.com has an affliate API program that can do the same stuff. So they have guts too, I guess.
You can see the results of the shopping.com api at http://routercomp.com .
I actually spent a lot of time with the version 1 Yahoo Shopping API as well, but it wasn’t monetizable and the database had a lower quality of data, and there were a few bugs in the API.
Pfft – yeah, I’ve known about Shopping.com’s API for a while but I refuse to give any love to a company that hides their API away and won’t tell anyone about it unless they’ve already agreed to be an ‘affiliate.’ No guts there.
Ok, more money for me then…
I do look forward to testing the Yahoo stuff to see if they’ve fixed some of the data quality issues.
Thanks for the kind words Greg. I manage marketing at Yahoo! Shopping. We hope to incorporate your ideas soon.
Keep up the great posts – I really enjoy your blog.