Web 2.0 Stores > Fast, Simple, Search Engine Friendly Ecommerce

The Santa Clara-based social shopping site Kaboodle is due to announce some major news at midnight EST. The first announcement is that they’re partnering with Shopping.com, who will supply their entire product catalogue to Kaboodle. The move will expand Kaboodle’s product listings to millions of items from thousands of merchants, and they’re leveraging Shopping.com’s API to make the magic happen. But the more interesting news is that they’re getting into the widget game. Once the site goes back online (it’s down for maintenance at the moment), you’ll be able to arrange a collection of your Kaboodle items into a collage, then convert it into a Flash widget for MySpace, Friendster, Xanga, blogs and websites. The widget will also allow other users to contribute items to the collection. What’s more, they’re launching Flash slideshows for MySpace and blogs, and new ways to view your Kaboodle content - either as an itinerary or a grid. One final addition: they’re launching Kaboodle Groups, which will allow multiple users to collaborate on a collection of items, complete with voting and commenting. The launch of widgets makes Kaboodle directly competitive with MyPickList, the product recommendation service from Sprout Commerce. Sprout also have a purely widget-based product that targets social networks more specifically - FavoriteThingz. Similar services include RightCart, an online store widget for your blog sidebar, and the French product recommendation service Zlio, which is expected to release an English version at some point. Meanwhile, CrowdStorm’s social network for shopping will include so-called MySpace codes when the public beta becomes available. Following so soon after the eBay deal, Kaboodle seems to be on a roll - I can only imagine that they’re headed for acquisition further down the road.

Crowdstorm, the social shopping site that first appeared on Mashable back in May, has started an invite-only beta. Crowdstorm is basically a cross between social networking, a Digg-like voting system and a shopping search engine - you submit products to the site using a form, and others can vote for the item by hitting the “recommend it!” button. What’s more, you can comment on items, add them to your wishlist, edit the product descriptions and search for the product on sites like eBay and Kelkoo. It goes without saying that there’s also a MySpace-style social network: you can create a profile, upload a picture, add friends and send messages to other users. Additional features include forums, tagging and RSS feeds. But Crowdstorm is really about two metrics: “buzz” and “Storm Points”. Buzz represents how much activity is going on around a product - are people voting for it? Are people blogging about it? You can rank items by buzz or recency, but I’ve no idea how they counteract negative buzz (ie. lots of people blogging about how poor a product is). It’s also worth noting that “blogging” doesn’t refer to some watered-down blog tool on Crowdstorm itself - instead, you can post items to your own blog and link back to the product page. Meanwhile, Storm Points are the points awarded to users for adding products, voting, leaving comments and blogging about items. They’re currently working on Crowdstorm widgets (feeding the MySpace beast, presumably) and a reputation system. Crowdstorm is really neat - well-designed and easy to use. But this is also an extremely crowded space - RightCart, MyPickList, WhatsBuzzing, ShopWiki, Zlio, Kaboodle and Wists are all trying variations on this theme. In the end, it comes down to execution: the idea may be great on paper, but it remains to be seen who performs best over the next few years.

Shopify is a simple to use, easy to setup ecommerce software application for Online merchants who want to manage and sell their products or services. Shopify motto pretty much sums it up for me “A shop in minutes, a business for life.”

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The birth of Web 2.0 has brought about several ecommerce 2.0 services and applications that are currently available to users interested in unique ecommerce services and features related to Web 2.0. The following list describes and links to many of the popular ecommerce 2.0 services.

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Online store owners are finding that they may have been able to save extra time and energy had they put more thought and effort into certain search engine optimization tasks and techniques BEFORE having a site developed by a ‘not-so’ search engine friendly designer, script or content management system.

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