Yahoo! Shopping US announces a deal with PriceGrabber

Read on the Yahoo! Developer Network today:

After careful consideration, we 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 as of March 11, 2010.
If you wish to continue to display syndicated shopping results for products listed on Yahoo! Shopping, you must apply to PriceGrabber for shopping syndication services. Although they do not offer a free web services API, you can find out more about how to apply to their program here:http://www.pricegrabber.com/about.php/about=corporate/sub_opt=10.
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.

The Yahoo! Shopping Team

The mail Yahoo! Shopping sent to its advertisers (via CPC Strategy):

[…] As of March 11, 2010, Yahoo! Shopping is partnering with PriceGrabber. This partnership will provide you with greater access to more potential customers and to enhanced reporting. It will give you the opportunity to list your products either on Yahoo! Shopping only or on both Yahoo! Shopping and PriceGrabber.

Because of this change, your Yahoo! Product Submit account will no longer be available on March 11, 2010. After March 11, 2010, to list your products either on Yahoo! Shopping only or on Yahoo! Shopping and PriceGrabber, you must sign up for a new merchant account with PriceGrabber. To ensure your products are live on Yahoo! Shopping on March 11, 2010, you must sign up for a PriceGrabber merchant account from January 11, 2010, through January 19, 2010. Signing up is fast and easy.

If you sign up before March 11, 2010, any applicable set up fees will be waived!

If you do nothing and do not sign up for a new merchant account, your products will only be listed on Yahoo! Shopping through March 11, 2010. After March 11, 2010, your products will no longer be listed. […]

A few thoughts:

• Not a surprise considering Yahoo! sold Kelkoo, its European shopping engine, in late 2008 – Shopping is not key to Yahoo! strategy as such; still the audience matters.
• Yahoo! Shopping being the number 1 shopping engine in the US according to ComScore (in terms of audience), PriceGrabber gets what seems a really good deal (the CPC Strategy article and another great article on CSEStrategies regarding this announcement are worth reading to understand what it means for PriceGrabber business-wise).
• A strategy that is similar of the outsourcing of the search to Bing : Yahoo! becomes a front-end company, outsourcing the backends and focusing on user experience… Let’s see if the new Yahoo! Shopping powered by PriceGrabber will bring an enhanced user experience (the relaunch of AOL Shopping in Apr’09 powered by the same PriceGrabber was a good surprise in terms of user interface).
• It’s really a shame Yahoo! stops the Shopping APIs in such an abrupt way, only a few days after explaining that BOSS will survive the deal with Bing… The Shopping APIs were really great, providing all you need to build your own CSE (search, guided navigation, product pages…); when Kelkoo was part of Yahoo!, we built our syndication platform as a fork of those APIs.