Monday, September 18, 2006

Shopping.com's Widgets - Code Free API Integration

Friday I had a conversation with Josh Wetzel, the Director of Business Development at Shopping.com. The subject of our conversation was the new Shop Widgets Shopping.com was offering. Their pr firm described Shop Widgets as...

"the first customizable pre-built advertising units that will allow Web merchants and publishers to easily add a new revenue source to their sites. With this new feature, Web site owners – small and large – will have access to an array of online materials to help customize their ads to help make money."

However, after speaking with Josh, I realized that there was a little more to these shop widgets than just some fancy pr ploy. In fact, the widgets can get as complicated or simple as you want them to be. Here's how they work.

1.) A webmaster signs up for the shopping.com partner program (you agree to let them serve some ads on your site for a certain category or keyword or combination thereof).

2.) You now have two options. The first is to use a wysiwyg form to enter a specific keyword or category or both and select the layout of the ads. Next you can specify the border of the ad and the color of the text and links.
Note: the one thing I don't like about this is there are very few options for how the ads are presented. They really want you to serve a skyscraper ad and offer no horizontal type ads at all.

3.) Then you cut and paste the code on your site (or page) and voila, you now have ads for shopping.com running on your site.

If you want to get more complicated you can send in keywords and categories on each page load and create dynamic ads for your site but that requires some experience with writing code or having access to a developer.

If you really want to go nuts then you can sign up for their full api which basically gives you the same functionality as they have on shopping.com and you can create a completely customizable interface like a few other sites. (which I appear to have lost the list of other sites using their api at the moment, I'll post it when I find it.)

A few other notes on the new shop widgets.
They have behavioral nature based on shopping.com collective intelligence on user behavior, but they are not contextual with regards to the content on the page they're published on.

ex: If you use the keyword "iPod" you'll get the most popular iPods at the moment on shopping.com.

By Jason Dowdell at 09:36 AM | Comments (0)

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