Starting in mid-March, Yahoo Shopping will no longer be a solo act. Yahoo announced today that it’s arranged to have PriceGrabber take care of some of the technical details, and it’ll be able to make one more cutback thanks to the adjustment.
A post on the Yahoo Developer Blog explained, "[W]e have decided to enter into a strategic partnership with PriceGrabber to power the Product Submit functionality of Yahoo! Shopping as of March 11, 2010. As a result of these changes, Yahoo! will no longer provide the Shopping Web Services API, including Shopping Results (the ‘Yahoo! Shopping Syndication Services’) to you . . ."
Not all developers are taking the news well, and considering that Yahoo and PriceGrabber haven’t offered anything in the way of free alternatives, it’s a little hard to blame them. Yahoo might hurt itself with this move, too, since less interest from developers could equate to less attention for Yahoo Shopping.
Still, Yahoo’s accounting department surely had a say in this decision, and it’s hard to imagine that traffic statistics weren’t taken into account. So this may help Yahoo save a significant amount of money while also allowing it to make a new corporate friend.
For what it’s worth, Yahoo also told developers, "It has been our privilege to provide you with Yahoo!’s shopping syndication product, and we hope to continue our relationship with you in other areas long into the future."
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