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Yahoo Shopping Launches API For Developers

Yahoo Shopping Launches API For Developers

Yahoo is taking larger steps to make itself a bit more attractive to web publishers. Besides the recent Y!Q Challenge and the newly announced Yahoo Publishers Contextual Advertising Network, Yahoo is also opening its back door to developers with API offerings. Yahoo announced the Yahoo Shopping APIs today as away for developers to include Yahoo Shopping’s comparison info in sites and desktop applications.

Jeffrey McManus, Director of the Yahoo! Developer Network writes on the YSearchBlog “Using the Shopping API, developers can create applications that search the Yahoo! database of millions of products and thousands of merchants, displaying prices and enabling searches in new and innovative ways.”

There are two different API offerings from Yahoo Shopping. The first is the Product Search API, which can be used to perform keyword searches; search specific merchants, price ranges or product categories, and evem filter merchants based on their Yahoo User ratings. The second API from Yahoo Shopping is the Price Comparison Grid API. This API opens up access to “millions of products offered by multiple merchants, returning base price, tax and shipping info and total price (based on zip code).”

Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable had an idea for integrating the API into an ecommerce software management system which would go beyond basic search info. “Forget simply about comparison search…Think about using pricing data, in real time, to be competitive. Competitor A decreases price of product Y by $1 under yours. You can then dynamically change your pricing to $1 under them. Obviously, one would need to make sure there is a minimum profit margin left, but that is an easy algorithm to build.”

I’m sure we’ll see some interesting uses of the Yahoo Shopping API. If any readers find an example out there please feel free to add a description and link in the comment box below.

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SEJ STAFF Loren Baker Founder at Foundation Digital

Loren Baker is the Founder of SEJ, an Advisor at Alpha Brand Media and runs Foundation Digital, a digital marketing ...

Yahoo Shopping Launches API For Developers

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