Yahoo Shoposphere launches tonight (well, officially at 6 am EST tomorrow, but I’ve gotten permission to write about it tonight). I met with Rob Solomon, Yahoo’s GM of Shopping, and Sabrina Crider, a Yahoo PR Manager, last week to take it for a test drive.
Yahoo is making a major push into search personalization and recommendations – the overall project is called “Shoposphere” and the major feature being released is called “Pick Lists“. Their goal is to move ecommerce towards what they call “me commerce”. Any registered Yahoo user can create a Pick List.
Get on the Shoposphere…Make a Pick List
Pick Lists let you share the stuff you love and the stuff that matters to you with everyone or your friends… on the Shoposphere, throughout Yahoo! Shopping, by email, and even through RSS feeds.
Make a good one and it could even show up as one of the highest rated Pick Lists on the Shoposphere.
Yahoo has allowed users to create “uber lists” of bookmarked shopping items for a few weeks now. Items may be saved to a public or private list. Pick Lists are a subset of these uber lists. A user selects any number of items from the 75+ million unique products in the Yahoo Shopping catalog, names the list, adds ratings and comments for each item, and publishes it to a permanent URL.
My “Web 2.0 Gadgets” Pick List can be viewed here. Like the list? Say yes or no and vote on it. Want to leave a comment? Add it at the bottom. Really like it? Subscribe to the RSS!
The more people that vote for a Pick List, the higher it will appear in the Shoposphere.
Tagging and Revenue Sharing
There are a couple of features being added in the near future. The first is tagging – all lists will be able to be tagged by users and the list creator for easier search (compare this to Amazon Tags, which I wrote about earlier today).
The second upcoming feature is revenue sharing. Yahoo expects many users to promote their Pick Lists and some will generate significant traffic. Yahoo Shopping earns revenue a number of ways from its shopping platform – clicks to vendors, overture ads, etc. They plan to share some of these revenue streams with Pick List publishers, giving publishers a bigger incentive to publicize these on their websites. Yahoo will provide promotion tools for picklists, similar to the flickr badges seen all over the web.
Yahoo is also hoping to use Pick Lists to promote more long tail items from Yahoo Shopping. While Yahoo will continue to promote various items throughout shopping, they can rely on user generated Pick Lists to push deeper, less known items as well.
Developer APIs
Yahoo is also releasing developer APIs to allow mashups with other applications.
Rob Solomon says Pick Lists are just the first major feature of the Shoposphere, and that they will be releasing new consumer driven merchandising soon. For another interesting experiment, check out Yahoo’s Mindset, an Ajax search interface which allows users to change search results based on whether they are more interested in “research” or “shopping”. It will be interesting to see how all of these features come together.
these yahoo pages remind me of the company called http://www.kaboodle.com who had some folks at the recent Tagcamp.
Al, Yes, there are similarities with Kaboodle. I really think they are products that serve different uses, though. Kaboodle for collaborative research, Pick Lists for shopping recommendations and exploitation of the long tail.
Sounds promising (well, everything except for the name), especially the additional revenue source for online publishers. I don’t know though, it’s still hard to think that I’ll use anything other than Amazon, or specialized retailers(Banana Republic, etc.) for my online shopping.
Kyle, Agree 100%. Remember that Yahoo has a really big search engine and already pumps a ton of commerce through shopping, though. This could have a big impact as bloggers and other websites add their Pick Lists badges to their sites…
Finally a company has realized that you abetter biz-model to entice your contributors to provide more reviews that are thoughtful. Rather than “I love this product” or “I hate this product”
How is this different than Amazon.com’s Listmania lists?
See the Listmania help page at
http://www.amaz...owse/-/14279651
Looks nearly identical to me. Amazon has had Listmania for several years.
I noticed on your Web 2.0 gadgets you made a comment about being able to send a company a pic and have them send you back a bobblehead. Just to let you know there are companies that do it. Search google for “personalized bobbleheads”.
Trackbacks and pingbacks and whatnon mixed in with comments is so very frustrating.
Mike:
This awesome, especially the part about revenue sharing with the publishers which can have a tremendous viral effect like Flickr badges (or Amazon’s associate program in the 1.0 days).
A more fundamental effect can be in people relying on others to find the specific products that are already researched. For example, I value one of my friend’s pre-shopping research/rating very highly and if he published a list it would be one of the firsts I would look at…and so many of our other friends as well. He stands to finally gain from all his research. The revenue sharing aspects can inspire lots of us to share more…and help others in the process. (refer to my post on “Own your content and charge for it” here: http://www.webvapors.com/?p=19)
One thing that might be a hurdle though is the service working within the Yahoo Shopping domain only. I am sure they will think through that…if they haven’t already.
Tagging as I comments yesterday gains one more supporter!
Lets wait and watch.
-Vaibhav
Also similar to swagroll.
Great info! It’s interesting to me that eBay made a big push last Friday for the reviews and guides pages, offering posters landing pages with links to their reviews, auctions, etc. similar to Amazon’s functionality.
The aforementioned tagging trend is evident here, as well. There are tag-like terms included in the newly revamped recommendations, as well.
Plus, AuctionBytes reported that eBay partners are working with Google Base. More on my blog.
The question is, who will shoppers trust this holiday season? Google’s prohibition on pop-ups and other annoying and interruptive tactics may give it the edge with serious spenders.
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There’s something pretty sweet going on at flippid.com – a new web 2.0 marketplace. I don’t know too much about it, but what I’ve heard sounds pretty interesting.
Seems that yahoo shopping wouldn’t like to let amazon go ahead..