New Categories in Baby Gear

Attention FTP Data Feed users!  We have released new categories that are now available for use. 

AtomID & Category Name
100001338   Baby Carriers
100001340   Chair Cushions
100001337   Stroller Accessories

FTP Data Feed Users: There are now new category files representing each new atomID.  Because these new categories are now available, there will be fewer offers in related Baby Gear category files as offers are recategorized into the newly created categories.  Make sure that if you are pulling specific Baby Gear categories from our FTP Data Feeds that you include these new categories. 

Catalog API: Query the Product Service by Offer

Hey Publishers,

 

At the request of several of your fellow publishers, we will be adding the ability to query the Catalog API Product Service by an offer's unique identifier ("offerId", or "OID") to return data related to a specific offer. 

 

In conjunction with the productId parameter, you will be able to set parameter productIdType to value "SZOID". Once you have entered a valid OID within the productId parameter, you will be able to return results for the related offer. Note that if you submit an invalid OID, no data for that OID will be returned in your result set.

 

Released: Thursday, August 6th

 

Don't forget to follow us on Twitter for snappy release notifications!  Upon release, you will be able to see an example result set returned with this new value through our Catalog API Interactive Documentation.  In order to access this documentation, you will need to log in with your Catalog API Key & Publisher ID.  Once you are in there, view the Product Service Resource section.  At the very bottom of this section, you will see a link "[ + ] show test form".  This will allow you to test out queries, viewing sample XML. 

 

For those of you who are not familiar with our Catalog API, this product provides advanced publishers with intuitive access to BizRate’s inventory of cataloged products and merchant offers through a query-based web service accepting various parameters, allowing publishers to filter based on their website’s shopping content needs. Based on these publisher-supplied parameters, customized BizRate shopping content is returned within an XML response.

 

As always, please do not hesitate to contact us should you have any questions.

 

The Shopzilla Publisher Team

 

Catalog API: Interactive Documentation

Hey Publishers,

Integrating any API can be a daunting task, and let's face it...no one wants to spend time navigating through hefty documentation. To make this process a little easier technically, we've created interactive documentation, providing a quick overview of each of the services included within the Catalog API, and allowing you to explore parameters, testing queries before you develop. 

This interactive documentation is easy to use, even if you are not sure what you would like to do quite yet. You are able to enter desired parameters into a simple form, and sample XML is returned for review.  Below, you can see the test form for our Merchant Service, which provides merchant data.

This interactive documentation is updated with any Catalog API production release, so it is always current and provides a good means of testing new parameters to determine whether or not you would like to make use of them within your website.

To access this interactive documentation, simply log in here using your unique API Key and Publisher ID: http://catalog.bizrate.com/services/catalog/v1/  

For those of you who are not familiar with our Catalog API, this product provides advanced publishers with intuitive access to BizRate’s inventory of cataloged products and merchant offers through a query-based web service accepting various parameters, allowing publishers to filter based on their website’s shopping content needs. Based on these publisher-supplied parameters, customized BizRate shopping content is returned within an XML response.

As always, please do not hesitate to contact us should you have any questions. Stay tuned into the blog for news on the latest Catalog API developments going forward!

The Shopzilla Publisher Team

Shopzilla UK Publisher Program launches Dynamic Assets

Hey Publishers,

We recently extended our Shopzilla Publisher Program to our friends over the pond in the UK. Offering BizRate.co.uk shopping content, our Shopzilla UK Publisher Program targets Publishers with websites geared toward a UK audience.

Now, in addition to text links, stock banners and our FTP Data Feed, the Shopzilla UK Publisher Program is proud to announce the release of dynamic assets!  Our UK Publishers are now able to create customized dynamic assets based on top keyword or category search results, or build comparison shopping assets for specific products. 

To find out more about the Shopzilla UK Publisher Program, please visit their blog, or for those who are ready to apply, we invite you to go directly to the Shopzilla UK Publisher Program registration page.  Please note that even if you are already participating in the Shopzilla US Publisher Program, you will need to apply separately for the Shopzilla UK Publisher Program.

Just one more way to generate CPC affiliate earnings!

The Shopzilla Publisher Team

Catalog API: Introducing New Element detailUrl

Hey Publishers,

 

At the request of several of your fellow publishers, we've added a new element within the Catalog API Product Service.  This new element appears within the <Offer> element of this service, and contains a link to the BizRate offer page for a specific offer.  This new element is called <detailUrl>.

 

The release of this new element should not impact you unless you have developed a means of auto-generating your XML handling code based on the XML schema document for the Product Service.  If you have done this, you will need to update your schema. 

 

To see an example of this new element, try out our Catalog API Interactive Documentation.  In order to access this documentation, you will need to log in with your Catalog API Key & Publisher ID.  Once you are in there, view the Product Service Resource section.  At the very bottom of this section, you will see a link "[ + ] show test form".  This will allow you to test out queries, viewing sample XML. 

 

For those of you who are not familiar with our Catalog API, this product provides advanced publishers with intuitive access to BizRate’s inventory of cataloged products and merchant offers through a query-based web service accepting various parameters, allowing publishers to filter based on their website’s shopping content needs. Based on these publisher-supplied parameters, customized BizRate shopping content is returned within an XML response.

 

As always, please do not hesitate to contact us should you have any questions.

 

The Shopzilla Publisher Team

 

Publisher Affiliate Spotlight: Snipi

 

Continuing our series of Publisher Spotlights, we had the opportunity to talk to Andre Golsorkhi, CEO and Founder of Snipi. Andre shared with us some information about Snipi, his experiences thus far with the Shopzilla Publisher Program and even offers some advice to Publishers. Enjoy the article and feel free to let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

Bryan: Andre, thanks for taking the time to talk to us. First question, what exactly is Snipi?

Andre: Snipi is a new social media platform that provides a smarter way for users to capture, organize, collaborate on, and share their personal interests - products, photos, videos and other content - from anywhere on the Web. It is the first online service of its kind that offers a patent-pending content capturing tool for both self-organization and group collaboration. Snipi's most compelling tool is a free Firefox add-on that enables users to literally drag and drop products, photos, videos and other content from anywhere online. The toolbar enables users to "snip" content directly from any webpage which will automatically save it to their personal profile. Users can share and collaborate through "Snipstreams" or broadcast to Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress and other online destinations.

Bryan: Around the middle of May, Snipi seemed to take off, particularly with a feature article in the Wall Street Journal. What has been the target audience for Snipi, and how have you approached the social network market?

Andre: We have created a place where people can organize their digital lives and collaborate with friends around their interests. We believe other services have major gaps in architecture and functionality, leaving their users disorganized and overwhelmed with information. With Snipi, we looked to create an application that would nail the organizational aspect of content capturing while also offering some of the most powerful group collaboration capabilities on the Web. Alot of credit has to go to our teams on the creative and technical side, coupled with our business development and PR talent that helped us achieve exposure in a very short period of time. We're extremely pleased with the initial coverage but with our newest features being released in the month of July, we're anticipating a real upswing in traction and coverage. It is exciting times!

Bryan: What process/steps did you take before deciding to work with the Shopzilla Publisher Program?

Andre: We were in the early stages of development when we reached out to potential partner CSE's and we needed a team with the understanding and patience to work with an early stage venture. Shopzilla's team took the time to understand our vision and gave us the attention necessary to help us achieve our goals. This level of service was a requirement for us as we were still working out the kinks well before public launch and Shopzilla stepped up to help us through those areas in which they could be involved, and ultimately benefit from our success.

Bryan: What role does the Shopzilla Catalog API feed play in the interactive nature of Snipi?

Andre: As Snipi users drag and drop products from virtually any online store, the Snipi Toolbar immediately and automatically scours the page for product information. While the Snipi Toolbar is very much about organizing products users are researching online, we also wanted to provide other relevant information to the user without having them ever leave the page. Shopzilla's Catalog API allows us to give users price comparison information on-the-fly, along with all the other features Snipi provides (saving, organizing, sharing through social networks, etc). We also use the Shopzilla Catalog API to provide our Snipi users the same price comparison data in the Snipi iPhone app as they have in the Snipi Toolbar. While the Shopzilla API is strongest in the consumer electronics space, we expect that there will be greater precision to other categories as both of our products develop further.

Bryan: You were one of the first Publishers to test our new Catalog API service, how have you found its integration with Snipi?

Andre: We integrated with the new Catalog API almost immediately after its release. Coming from a team developing new technology and services we expect that the first iterations of a product will have a lot of kinks to be worked out. We were pleasantly surprised by how stable the new Catalog API was and how quickly we were able to make the change over. As a failsafe, however, we kept the old Catalog API in place just in case. Fortunately, as a result of the Shopzilla team's clean execution, we never found ourselves in a circumstance where we needed to revert to the old API.

Bryan: Overall, what has your experience been like with Shopzilla?

Andre: So far, so good! We're an early stage company and we still have a lot of our own kinks to work out, so, it is nice to have partners we can rely on and who don’t create more work for us than we already have. We hope that as our product evolves, we can work even more closely with the Shopzilla team to improve both our feature sets.

Bryan: Finally, do you have any tips or comments that you would like to offer any potential Publishers reading this article?

Andre: Publishers looking to build applications with or upon price comparison data should recognize that the gaps in product accuracy are in the CSE's control by only so much. No matter how strong of a search platform it is that they can build, inaccuracy will always fall prey to outside factors: 1) the difficulty in cataloging soft goods and 2) the lack of adherence to a web standard for product display and identification. I would urge publishers who may be working closely with or who have retailer relationships to help give more traction to the implementation of online product standards. This can be done by developing applications using this standard and showing them the benefits or by using your retailer relationships to influence their marketing and technical teams. The single most influential and far reaching development in this space will be the adherence of all stakeholders to an online product publishing standard. With a product catalog backbone, everyone will benefit.

Thanks to Andre for taking the time out to talk to us about Snipi. If you are interested about finding out more, or would like to try the Snipi toolbar, head on over to www.snipi.com. Snipi can also be found on Twitter: @snipi

Affiliate Tax Update in California

David Lewis at ReveNews has continued his excellent coverage and commentary on the affiliate tax issues threatening the affiliate industry.  We previously discussed his related post on the Shopzilla Publisher Blog.

In his latest article, "Shopzilla as Our White Knight: CPC to replace commissions", Lewis particularly focuses on California bill AB178 and the potential outfall of its passage.

Please head over to ReveNews to check it out!

An Interview with Jeff Jarvis

The Shopzilla Publisher Program had the unexpected pleasure of sitting down with Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do? and who blogs BuzzMachine, at the Aspen Ideas Festival to chat about a couple of timely topics related to online media and advertising.

 

We asked Mr. Jarvis to share his perspective on the affiliate sales tax issue. Mr. Jarvis sees both sides of the issue. On one hand, he appreciates that brick & mortar retailers are disadvantaged by having to collect sales tax from customers. On the other hand, he's concerned about public policies that could hamper the growth of e-commerce. Mr. Jarvis went on to reiterate the viewpoint he laid-out in his book; that manufacturers and retailers are likely to operate "showrooms" for products they sell and that those products will likely be shipped to customers, with the exception of when customers have a time-sensitive need to possess them. (I personally would've appreciated having access to a showroom where I could've previewed some furniture that I recently purchased from Pottery Barn.)

 

In Jarvis' book, he maintains that real-estate agents and car salesman don't necessarily reduce transactional friction. So, Shopzilla was also interested in whether he sees Comparison Shopping Engines (CSEs) and Retail Aggregators as adding value or acting as middlemen. His view was that if CSEs only extract value from the market, then they're not adding value. Certainly, CSEs add value to online retailers insofar as they qualify buyer leads (clicks) to those retailers and drive sales within their allowable ranges. Shopzilla Publisher is extremely focused on ensuring that we create merchant value by vigilantly monitoring the quality of traffic that originates from our network of affiliates. That leaves us with the question of whether we add value for consumers. Some might maintain that the transparency CSEs create around product prices creates value for consumers. Though, this feature is one that is quickly becoming commoditized by the large number of comparison shopping sites that exist today. It made this writer stop and think about what more CSEs need to do to create consumer value beyond price comparison.

 

Jarvis attended the AIF session at which Eric Schmidt spoke. In his post about the session, Mr. Jarvis noted that someone asked Schmidt about Froogle, to which Schmidt apparently responded:

"Why did you remind me". Why didn’t it work? "It didin’t work because it just didn’t work. We celebrate our failure in the company because we want people to take risks."

If it's not working, then why is Google featuring product search results so prominently in its general results? Mr. Jarvis believes it makes Google's results more valuable and relevant; and given that Schmidt acknowledged that 97% of Google's revenue come from advertising, Jarvis believes Google might try to better monetize the product search listings on Google. Shopzilla will certainly be paying close attention.

 

We also discussed a recent post by Jon Fine about Barry Diller's perspective on paid web content. Diller was quoted as saying:

 "People will pay for content. I absolutely believe the internet is passin from its free phase into a paid system."

While Mr. Jarvis is not opposed to publishers charging for content, he believes that a predominantly paid model simply won't work. We believe he shares Shopzilla Publisher's view that "the data yearns to be free". Walling the content takes it out of the conversation, which is where news and journalism is happening today. His belief is that consumers will continue to pay for access to content in cases where an advantage can be had from timely access to that information. For example, Bloomberg can command hefty premiums for its content because the consumers of that content can take advantage of market opportunities from its timely access (even if that window is only 6/10s of a second).

 

We closed our conversation by noting that BuzzMachine has all of two advertisements on its site: 1 AdSense placement and 1 BlogAd placement. So, of course, we wanted to know whether BuzzMachine wants to run Shopzilla Publisher Program ads. Jarvis' answer: Sure. There's nothing wrong with that answer!

 

Catalog API Migration: Happy July!

Hey Publishers,

It's July 1st, our deadline for having migrated from the old Catalog API platform to the new Catalog API platform.

We know many of you are still testing, finishing up your migration process.  The old Catalog API platform should remain relatively accessible, though we will NOT be supporting it and NOT able to guarantee its availability beyond 11:59pm PST July 1, 2009.

We've received much feedback through the course of this migration, and have tried to implement as many of the features requested as were able to in this short time.  Monday, July 6th, we will be releasing an updated 'API & Data Feeds' page within the Publisher Portal with access to our most current documentation- both static and interactive.  Stay tuned into the blog for news on the latest Catalog API developments going forward!

For those of you who are not familiar with our Catalog API, this product provides advanced publishers with intuitive access to BizRate’s inventory of cataloged products and merchant offers through a query-based web service accepting various parameters, allowing publishers to filter based on their website’s shopping content needs. Based on these publisher-supplied parameters, customized BizRate shopping content is returned within an XML response.  Your comrades who are already using the Catalog API have been hustling to migrate from our old platform to our new, more scalable platform.

As always, please do not hesitate to contact us should you have any questions, particularly as it relates to your migration to the new Catalog API.

The Shopzilla Publisher Team