The holiday shopping season is upon us, and that means finding gifts, and at this point… quick! For consumers, it translates into searching and researching, and lots of it in a relatively small amount of time. It also means shoppers are looking for innovative websites or applications to aid them in finding gifts, low prices, and sweet deals — all while making the shopping experience more enjoyable.
Roomorama is not the only one in the person to person travel accomodations game. The company is in a space that’s been well established by other players: CouchSurfing, Vacation Rentals By Owner and, of course, AirBnB. While there’s an AirBNB API planned, the only room rental site that is currently public with its platform is the the Roomorama API.
Popular room rental service AirBNB does not yet have an official AirBNB API. But signs point to one’s existence, as well as an affiliate plan in place to pay developers for reservations booked through the API. If the company sticks with the plan as written now, developers will be able to make up to 10 million API calls per day before contacting AirBNB.
The race to deliver the best deals of the neighbourhood to you has been intense over the last year. 8coupons is a coupon aggregator that allows users to access thousands of deals. The company released a new version of the 8coupons API with higher rate limits and new ways to access more data.
The daily deal space is hot, and has been for some time now. In the past year 23 million Americans have purchased a daily deal or group coupon according to a survey conducted for the American Institute of CPAs by Harris Interactive (source). Not to mention Freelance websites, such as Freelancer and Elance, have been flooded with thousands of “Groupon clone”, “daily deal site” and related job postings – a general sign that many more businesses are still trying to get in.
X.commerce is the new brand for the developer commerce tools that include the eBay API and PayPal API. The first conference under this new brand is coming in October to San Francisco. As a media partner, we have a promo code, as well as a little more information about how the company is looking to create a sum greater than its parts with the X.commerce platform.
E-Commerce covers a broad range of inter-connected processes which eventually leads to a transaction between two or more parties. Recent enhancements in technology, specifically social interactions on the Web, have increased the complexity in analyzing these processes and describing E-Commerce as a whole. And, to be honest, there is a lot of confusion within the terminology of “E-Commerce” itself. The exact definition of E-Commerce varies depending on your source, and you might hear words like e-business, e-retailing, and online shopping all used interchangeably. Mind you, they all have different meanings.
There’s always been a little annoyance on the end of affiliate APIs, those that pay developers money for referring buyers. In exchange for a potential sale, developers have to send their users to the company’s site to complete the transaction. In the future, many of those purchasers will be able to remain using the developer’s application for the length of the sale. We’re a step closer to that future with a new release from API management company Mashery (a ProgrammableWeb sponsor). Mashery customers can now process transactions through their APIs, which means the potential for applications with lower barriers between a customer and a sale. And yes, that little annoyance at the end of affiliate APIs could be going away.
First, a close friend loses everything in a house fire. Not long after, close family members are rocked when a flood destroys their belongings. What can be done in the face of tragedy and loss? For the noble minded the only thing to do is to work to better prepare your friends and neighbors for the next catastrophe to strike. This was the story told by Jennifer Morehead, CEO and founder of Lockboxer, a site to track your stuff that makes a refreshing use of shopping APIs to find out how much your stuff is worth.
MyBantu is an interesting little mashup, available as an iPhone app, an Android app, and a website. Its goal is to make shopping for anything, especially restaurants and movies, easier and more social. It uses Yelp API, Netflix API and various others to make it happen. It’s very similar in idea to Siri, the “ultimate mashup” that Apple later gobbled up in the largest mashup acquisition ever.
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