San Francisco — Beginning soon around mid-March, Yahoo Shopping will no more be a solo entity. Yahoo announced today that it is incorporating Yahoo Shopping with comparison shopping search engine PriceGrabber, to handle some of the technical details, and it will be able to make one more cutback thanks to the adjustment.
A post on the Yahoo Developer Blog explained, “We have finalized to enter into a “strategic partnership” with PriceGrabber to power the Product Submit functionality of Yahoo! Shopping as of March 11, 2010.” PriceGrabber will manage all the product listings and split resulting revenue with Yahoo, as a result of these changes, Yahoo! will no longer provide the Shopping Web Services API, including Shopping Results to you, although Yahoo will continue to sell ads on the Yahoo Shopping site.
“This partnership will combine the Yahoo Shopping and PriceGrabber marketplaces allowing merchants and advertisers to gain access to a larger shopper base and users to gain access to even more products,” a spokeswoman said.
Not all developers are accepting the news well, and considering that Yahoo and PriceGrabber have not offered anything in the way of free alternatives, it is 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.
But, according to a post at SearchEngineLand that indicates — there may be a pattern at play here. Yahoo has already agreed to outsource the back-end of its search engine to Microsoft and there are other Yahoo properties where similar partnerships could be introduced. One property Yahoo is already doing that with: Yahoo Travel, which for years has been powered by Travelocity.
Even so, Yahoo’s accounting department surely had a say in this decision, and it is hard to imagine that traffic statistics were not 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 is 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.”