In the recent Shop.org report - "State of Retailing Online" - 55% of online retailers want to focus more on widgets.

Here at nooked HQ we are seeing more and more retailers using widgets to engage with consumers - ranging from desktop widgets, facebook applications, twitter feeds and web widgets. Real validation of FeedCommerce.

More details from report

The study also found 53 percent of retailers surveyed allocated their marketing budgets toward customer acquisition and 21 percent of their marketing budget toward customer retention.

Other findings include:
* 35 percent of retailers will continue to market through search engines.
* 90 percent will use pay-for-performance search placement and 79 percent said they will make this a priority this year.
* 85 percent said they have used some shipping with conditions promotion in the past and 35 percent said they will focus on more of these promotions this year.
* 65 percent said they will increase focus on social networking advertisements
* 55 percent said they will focus on Web widgets.

feedcommerce platforms

feedcommerce platforms are internet-scale distribution networks for enabling feedcommerce by distributing products, offers and deals between many retailers, publishers and consumers. A feedcommerce platform combines aggregation and syndication of feed content with comprehensive tracking and analytics of activity within the feed network.

Learn more about the nooked feed platform.

feedcommerce for consumers

Rather than having to periodically go to many retailers web sites to browse and search for products, feedcommerce makes online shopping and buying a more direct and passive experience for consumers. For the consumer a key attraction of feedcommerce is the ability to create or configure widgets that deliver products that match their intentions. This achieved by using the widget to create a personalised feed. Personalised feeds allow consumers to signal their intent by configuring the widget to deliver only the content they are interested in.

Personalised feeds

If you wanted to fly to Amsterdam in a couple of months and want to find a good flight deal it would be far easier to use an agent that will do the searching for you rather than constantly check various web sites (or newspapers!) for the best flight option. A key element of feedcommerce is enabling consumers to create these personalised feed 'agents' that only return the products and offers that match the consumers interests.

Using the flight example above, a personalised feed can be indirectly created through a widget using a number of simple parameters:

• The type of product (a flight)
• The departure and destination airports (e.g. From SFX to NYC)
• The dates or date ranges for travel
• The vendors (airline carriers or intermediary travel website)
• The maximum price ($500)

Other examples illustrate the variety of products that can be distributed via feeds. Some more examples might be:

• Special Offers / Deals - For example, if a consumer wants to buy a new flat-screen TV they could specify they are looking for a 42" LCD TVs from Panasonic OR Philips for less than $2000
• Events - a consumer could specify they are looking for tickets for U2 gigs in Europe in the next 6 months
• Dating - a consumer could describe the type of person they are looking to meet online

In each case, the consumers personalised feed will only ever contain items whenever participating retailers are offering products within the specified parameters.

These are just examples of the options the consumer might have to chose from to create their personalised feed agent. Widgets based on advanced feedcommerce systems present rich user interfaces to the consumer to allow them to create personalised feeds that will do all the searching for them and deliver the results directly to their platform of choice. The rich format of underlying product feed data is key to enabling creation of user interfaces that ordinary internet users can interact with.

Hide the feeds!

A key success factor in the adoption of feedcommerce is the avoidance of exposing the raw underlying feed and platform technology to the consumer. A common observation by many technology evangelists is that the average internet user (the ones who comprise 90% of the internet population!) do not 'get' feeds yet. In almost all instances of successful feed commerce deployments when a consumer is configuring their agent there are no references in the user interface that relate to the underlying feed or platform technology. However, the key point, in the context of the audience for this article is that feeds are the lingua franca of feedcommerce.

feedcommerce for publishers

Web publishers are predominately concerned with generating revenue by increasing traffic to and enabling internet commerce through their web properties. Feed commerce enables embedding of retailer product information using established web standards to publish and syndicate product data in an accessible and reusable format.

Widgets

The primary visualization for feedcommerce product information has come to be known as a "widget".  According to Wikipedia, a web widget is:

A portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation

Wikipedia

Widgets are in effect the touch points for consumers, allowing a personalised shopping experience. Widgets (also referred to as gadgets, modules or applets) are often written in Flash or JavaScript to enable rich user interface and interaction.

Widgets have become more and more important on the internet because they are so easy to use and they enable discrete packets of data to be published directly to the consumers preferred location. The mobility of widgets is primarily a result of the recent proliferation of widget engines support in both operating systems and web sites. As a result several platforms for widgets now exist.

Widgets on Instant Messaging devices

In May 2005 Microsoft acquired a company called MessageCast, a provider of automated alerting and messaging technology that at the time supported the MSN Alerts service. Currently MessageCast is powering Windows Live Alerts, which lets users receive RSS feeds via IM. This is particularly appealing where users need to be alerted of updates or news on an near instant basis.

Social networks + widgets

Social networks deserve a special mention in the context of widgets. MySpace is often credited with being a primary factor in the success of YouTube by hosting millions of YouTube video widgets directly within MySpace user pages. Since the release of the Facebook Platform API (the interface that allows 3rd party companies to add applications to Facebook user pages) in May 2007 Facebook has experienced phenomenal user base growth that has made it a compelling retailing platform in of itself. Already many companies are making their products and services visible to Facebook users, opening up a whole new consumer market.

feedcommerce for merchants

What type of retailers want to create feeds? It turns out a variety of commercial 'product' data is suitable for distribution via feeds:

• Physical products - online stores can expose their entire itinerary of products via feeds
• Events - event promoters can publish feeds that contain entries for events that they are promoting
• Contacts - social networks can publish feeds that contain members public contact details
• Travel - airlines, hotels and agents can publish feeds of travel/accommodation deals
• Reviews - online review sites can publish feeds of all their product reviews

Location-based listings

Additional location-based listings/offers, particularly applicable to Internet-connected mobile phones are a highly promising market segment right now. If you are walking through your local shopping mall you might want to be contacted on your mobile phone with special offers from shops you frequent as you approach them. feedcommerce gives consumers the control - they can pre-subscribe to feeds on their home PC and their mobile device receives the same content.

Presenting your feeds

How many feeds should retailers create? It depends on how they want to present their product data. For example a feed could be a specialised list of offers and deals, such as a travel agency feed containing flight specials. A feed could equally contain the retailer's entire product catalogue.

Tracking your feeds

Retailer will of course want to be able to track activity on their product feeds and see how they are being distributed and how the market is receiving their products. feedcommerce platforms, which we will discuss below, facilitate this and also allow retailers to engage with publishers (and consumers!) in revenue sharing arrangements to further promote products through new channels using a variety of revenue models.

Of course creating feeds is just a means to an end. The standard feed format allow publishers (or the retailer themselves!) to easily develop and distribute widgets throughout the internet.

Early examples of feedcommerce

Back in 2004 Yahoo's Scott Gatz reported on feeds of promotional products:

Traditional and upcoming commerce sites are using RSS as a way to get new products, deals of the day, or other interesting commerce in front of users regularly.

Scott Gatz

Amazon has proven itself to be one of the most innovative companies in ecommerce and that is no exception when it comes to feedcommerce. The Amazon E-Commerce Service(ECS) provides APIs to allow third parties to build new ecommerce services, using the Amazon ECS APIs to generate product RSS feeds content - for example a"Buy 2 Get 1 Free Store".

The Amazon TypePad Widget is a good examples of feedcommerce in action. EBay also offer product search results via RSS feeds with the user receiving feed updates whenever new products appear that match their search and the EBay To Go Widget builds on this by providing a feedcommerce widget for consumers. The popular one-product-per-day site, Woot, also publishes its product offers via a RSS feed. The key step to enabling feedcommerce is to allow consumers to easily create and view feed-based products lists themselves.

feedcommerce is now a firm reality. With the emergence of affiliate marketing and independent prosumer site owners, feed commerce now embraces three participant types - retailers, publishers and consumers.

Feed powered advertising

RSS feeds have long been a location for advertisement for commercial products or services. We have seen FeedBurner introduce FeedFlare, a way for publishers to add content into their feed during syndication - for example a 'Digg this' link/count, or a custom FeedFlare which promotes another website. TLA introduced a similar service, called Feedvertising - which enables publishers to include messages or simple text advertisements in their feed. However, neither of these services treat the feed content as the advert.

We have also seen the arrival of feed powered ads where the content of an advert hosted on a website is provided via an RSS feed. A good example is the RSS-powered advertising model on Gabe Rivera's popular news tracking site Techmeme. Although not new at the time (CNET, nooked, Pheedo and others had done this before) this concept has become increasingly utilized on the Web because it offers the advertiser a level of control over the advertisement content that is not possible via other CPC (cost-per-click) or CPM (cost per thousand impressions) based advertising systems.

A benefit of RSS-powered ads is that the advertiser can update their advert at any point, to respond to daily news or address a particular issue - or perhaps just to become part of the conversations that are constantly happening in the blogosphere. It also, as both Wilson and Jeff Jarvis pointed out, makes the advertising more relevant to the content of its host site. In the case of Techmeme, the RSS-driven sponsor ads offer tech news stories which blend in well that Techmeme's content - which makes the ads more relevant, which enhances the advertiser's brand and the click-thrus.

feedcommerce: an introduction

Online retailers have vast silos of product information in their websites that could be used to increase sales and revenue if distributed to consumers via the many feed based channels that now exist on the internet. feedcommerce embraces this intent by enabling distribution of product information directly to consumers via feeds and widgets. Through feedcommerce retailers make their product information available to publishers via the RSS and Atom feed publication and syndication standards. Publishers then present the product data to consumers via rich user interfaces like widgets, allowing consumers to filter the data to their interests.

Fred Wilson, a leading VC blogger, initially described feed commerce as:

...feed commerce is when I subscribe to a feed of items that are of interest to me. I have subscribed to feeds of iTunes music for several years. I get the top 10 new releases, top 10 albums, top 10 songs, etc delivered to me via a feed. If I want to buy any of them, I click on the link. I have never understood why more retailers don't do this. I want to get my concert tickets this way. I want to get promotions and offers this way. I want my feed reader to be my offer inbox...

Fred Wilson

Retailers, publishers and consumers

feedcommerce allows retailers to open their product information to all of the current and future Web platforms that reach consumers - such as social networks, blogs, start pages, mobile services and search services. Today these platforms are driving retail distribution and consumption to the edges of the network. feedcommerce creates the opportunity for publishers and consumers to generate revenue by endorsing retailers through the distribution of feed driven widgets.

Sophisticated feedcommerce platforms allow publishers to track consumer interactions with their widgets enabling revenue sharing models such as Cost Per Action (CPA).

from eBay’s CEO Meg Whitman’s interview on Techcrunch

Q: eBay, along with Amazon and Yahoo, is now one of the elder statesmen of the Web. Do destination sites matter anymore? Whitman: My view is that, just as in many businesses, brands really matter. There will always be a role for destination sites. Eighty million users come to our destination. I think that will be the vast majority of our future business.

That said, we must be in distributed commerce in the future, taking listings for auctions and Shopping.com and distributing them to other sites. If they are not going to come to us, we are going to come to them. We are not at all averse to distributed commerce.

Donahoe: In many ways, our buyers will lead us there. We are making it much easier to bring eBay listings to your Facebook page, Myspace page, and shopping listings to various sites. eBay�s unique inventory offers better alternative [than other sources].

Meg Whitman

What type of retailers want to use feedcommerce?

It turns out a variety of commercial ‘product’ data is suitable for distribution via feeds.

• Physical Products – online stores can expose their entire itinerary of products via feeds.
• Events – event promoters can publish feeds that contain entries for events that they are promoting.
• Contacts – social networks can publish feeds that contain members public contact details.
• Travel – airlines, hotels and agents can publish feeds of travel/accommodation deals.
• Reviews – online review sites can publish feeds of all their product reviews.

Consumers want control – they can pre-subscribe to ecommerce feeds and widgets based on their intentions – and those product offers will alert them when their intention is matched.

Check out this New York Times article on “Your Personal Shopper With the Initials R.S.S.”

How many feeds should retailers create?

It depends on how they want to present their product data. For example a feed could be a specialized list of offers and deals, such as specific flight specials based on routes, dates and price.

A feed could equally contain the retailer’s entire product catalog.

Retailers will of course want to be able to track activity on their product feeds and see how they are being distributed and how the market is receiving their products.

feedcommerce platforms, which we will discuss later, facilitate this.

Of course creating feeds is just a means to an end. Structured feed formats allow retailers to easily develop and distribute eCommerce widgets throughout the internet – but you need to build this from a platform – not hacked one-off widgets.

Examples of feedcommerce - eBay

Desktop widget (San Dimas)

The eBay desktop widget (codenamed San Dimas) is another example of distributed ecommerce to the desktop. The eBay desktop application enable occasionally connected use, customised content views, and a branded experience that can act as a platform for closer relationships with customers. Once click away from eBay on your desktop.

Amazon has proven itself to be one of the most innovative companies in e-commerce and that is no exception when it comes to feed commerce.

RSS Tag Feeds

Amazon provides support for RSS in the form of tag-based RSS feeds. For example see www.amazon.com/rss/tag/blu-ray/new – products tagged blu-ray for the very first time and my own tag feed for products http://www.amazon.com/rss/people/A1TN3320DDHFY4/products

Amazon Gold Box

Amazon Gold Box is a service that provides you with personalized deals every day. It provides an RSS feed with your daily deals.

Amazon Widgets

Amazon Widgets provides a range of widgets which include product data for reuse on blogging, social network and affiliate websites.

Amazon E-Commerce Service(ECS)

The Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS) provides APIs to allow third parties to build new e-commerce services, using the Amazon ECS APIs to generate product RSS feeds content.

Amazon Wish Lists

Although not supported directly from the site, Amazon provides web services to RSS enable your wishlist. Other examples – such as Jeff Bezos wishlist in RSS can be found here and also a Yahoo Pipe service for your wishlist

RSS feeds have long been a location for advertisement for commercial products or services. We have also seen the arrival of feed powered ads where the content of an advert – generally in widget format – hosted on a website is provided via an RSS feed.

A good example is the feed-powered advertising model on Gabe Rivera’s popular news tracking site Techmeme.

Although not new at the time (CNET, nooked, Pheedo, Feedburner and others had done this before) this concept has become increasingly utilized on the Web because it offers the advertiser a level of control over the advertisement content that is not possible via other advertising systems.

A benefit of RSS-powered ads is that the advertiser can update their advert at any point, to respond to new product inventory or address a particular issue – or perhaps just to become part of the online conversation.

Fred Wilson, had this to say on feed powered advertising

Here is why feed powered ads are so great. The ad unit simply is a mini feed reader. The advertiser retains real time control of what goes into the ad. They simply update their feed and the ad changes. And it brings advertising and content closer together.

next up – early examples of feedcommerce

We’ve previously mentioned feedcommerce – so here is a more detailed introduction to the concept

Online retailers have vast silos of product information in their websites that could be used to increase sales and revenue if distributed to consumers via the many feed based channels that now exist on the internet.

feedcommerce embraces this intent by enabling distribution of product information directly to consumers via feeds and widgets. Through feedcommerce retailers make their product information available to publishers via the RSS and Atom feed publication and syndication standards.

Publishers then present the product data to consumers via rich user interfaces like widgets, allowing consumers to filter the data to their interests.

Fred Wilson, a leading VC blogger, initially described feed commerce as:

...feed commerce is when I subscribe to a feed of items that are of interest to me. I have subscribed to feeds of iTunes music for several years. I get the top 10 new releases, top 10 albums, top 10 songs, etc delivered to me via a feed. If I want to buy any of them, I click on the link. I have never understood why more retailers don’t do this. I want to get my concert tickets this way. I want to get promotions and offers this way. I want my feed reader to be my offer inbox…

feedcommerce allows retailers to open their product information to all of the current and future Web platforms that reach consumers – such as social networks – facebook, blogs, start pages – netvibes and mobile services – widsets.

Today these platforms are driving retail distribution and consumption to the edges of the network.

feedcommerce creates the opportunity for publishers and consumers to generate revenue by endorsing retailers through widget marketing.

Bonus link – read more on how our client koodos is using feedcommerce

next up – we will discuss Feed Advertising

Yes, we are alive and well – apologies for lack of blogging – I promise to write more…. and more. We’re about to release some new products into the wild, but firstly I want to give a backdrop to what we’re up to.

Back in 2004 when the web was full of RSS virgins – over pints of Guinness in Sligo we threw around scenarios on what RSS would be used for. Distributing press releases, subscribing to blogs, tracking product announcements, etc were all scribbled down on the back of the beer mats. Three years later RSS is everywhere – publishers are using RSS to distribute media, marketers are using RSS to push out press releases and product offers, start pages are the new web2.0 rage – and rss is the “plumbing” of the whole web2.0 movement.

Back in nooked labs we were having loads of fun educating, evangelizing and promoting RSS as a great marketing tool. We were not alone. Loads of marketers answered the “call to action”. With our feedwizard product, we were able to see first hand what people were doing around RSS marketing. But a lot of folks just don’t get the religion. RSS is still too geeky for some – we need better ways for the consumer to get information.

One interesting project one of our developers, Padraig, did last year to address the “geekiness” issue [obviously using his 20% time] is almost ready to come out of the lab. Padraig “created” feeds from his favourite online retailers – and we built up a nice collection of feeds. As Dave Winer has said “Feeds containing commercial information people want, are wired”. He added in other clever additions to tweak the output options – some personalized filters [Thanks Toni for the tip] and a little widget [dogfooding widget marketing].

The online shoppers in nooked labs love our service – the bigger credit card bills is proof of that love. This project – nicknamed “feedshop” – for really simple shopping – has came in handy when we talk to online retailers – it certainly helps at demo time. The analogy we use for retailers is “feedcommerce = an e-commerce system driven by RSS”.

Fred Wilson – the renowned VC blogger – also thinks feedcommerce is big biz. feedcommerce is the next generation e-commerce system and RSS is the currency! feedcommerce presents opportunities for a lot of folks. For consumers it means subscribing to personalized RSS feeds of products that are of interest to them and which they may purchase from time to time. For online retailers, it means providing their users with the means to create these personalized product and service feeds. It also means utilizing all the Web platforms that are available to reach consumers – such as blogs, social networks, start pages, Google, and so on.

Stay tuned as nooked introduces “feedshop” into the world – we may come up with a different name – but now back to work for a bit as we build the first feedcommerce platform in the world.