Mashery

We find ourselves livin la vida loca this week in Vegas! Exciting week here as we not only have the largest gathering of online retail vendors at the Shop.org Annual Summit; we also have all these odd virtualization people in town (just kidding).

Shop.org is focused on the challenges and opportunities most pressing to Digital Retail, including:

· Web 2.0 and its empowering effect on online shoppers
· Best practices in online marketing and merchandising
· Analytics and how to make your findings work for your business
· Customer focused website design
· Multichannel integration

These are the same opportunities we see in the online retail space. With more and more conversations about consumer products happening away from the retailers site, there is a need for online retailers to follow the model of the physical world and be everywhere. What do we mean by this? Whether it’s an affiliate partners site, a rating and reviews site, a niche blog, or the latest social networking site – conversations are happening where people gather to talk about their passion whether it’s shoes, fashion, electronics, or travel. We see this as a perfect opportunity for online retailers to syndicate their catalog content to new channels across the web via APIs.

Mashery has been developing a solution for retailers that enables establishment of a successful Affiliate Developer Program like that of Amazon, eBay or one of Mashery’s clients Shopping.com. Online retailers can create the kind of direct customer interaction that traditional affiliate programs, which use links and banner ads for example, can’t match. By using APIs to extend online presence, digital retailers can:

· Reach More Customers through a model of virtual densification
· Bring in More Revenue by driving more highly qualified consumers to their site(s)
· Broaden Marketshare by moving past traditional search advertising & SEO

In the weeks ahead we will share more insight to how this model works as we look forward to announcing new customers in the multichannel retail space! Keep watching.