So all you developer types who have been keen on the Yahoo! Shopping Product Submit API… step forward and get your new permissions from Pricegrabber.  Better hurry though, as you have until March 11, 2010 to make the adjustment. Welcome to another round of Yahoo! outsourcing.

Announced earlier today,  search engine giant Yahoo!, entered into what they call a “strategic partnership” with the well known comparison shopping engine, Pricegrabber,  to power the Shopping Web Services API, including Shopping Results (the “Yahoo! Shopping Syndication Services).  It will be interesting to watch how Pricegrabber handles this task.  As Pricegrabber looks to gain heavily from this partnership, developers and merchants need to be aware that Pricegrabber is not a free Web services API.

This means merchants will only be able to get their products into Yahoo! Shopping through either Pricegrabber and Yahoo Search, which is provided by Bing.  After the move of Yahoo Search to Bing, many thought it would be an obvious choice to outsource the Shopping Web Services API to Bing as well.  Some speculate the move towards Pricegrabber for this task is based on the fact that Pricegrabber holds a larger database of products than Bing.  Others point to the existing ties between Microsoft and Yahoo, with their current search relationship, and suggest it may have been a simple business decision to not go with Microsoft.

Merchants who use Google Merchant Center must be thrilled.

The executive team at Pricegrabber must be doing a big dance on the conference room tables.  This will dramatically effect the market share of visits to comparison shopping engines.  I can’t wait to see the effects.

Like Brian Smith, I too believed this function would have fallen to Bing. Heck, we have even been preparing for it here at Vertical Rail.  Now, like Brian, I must admit I got that one wrong.  Well, kinda. We all saw it coming. We just did not think it would be Pricegrabber.

As for the developers and merchants this will effect:  At least they waited until after the holiday season.