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Early examples of feedcommerce

Back in 2004 Yahoo's Scott Gatz reported on feeds of promotional products:

Traditional and upcoming commerce sites are using RSS as a way to get new products, deals of the day, or other interesting commerce in front of users regularly.

Scott Gatz

Amazon has proven itself to be one of the most innovative companies in ecommerce and that is no exception when it comes to feedcommerce. The Amazon E-Commerce Service(ECS) provides APIs to allow third parties to build new ecommerce services, using the Amazon ECS APIs to generate product RSS feeds content - for example a"Buy 2 Get 1 Free Store".

The Amazon TypePad Widget is a good examples of feedcommerce in action. EBay also offer product search results via RSS feeds with the user receiving feed updates whenever new products appear that match their search and the EBay To Go Widget builds on this by providing a feedcommerce widget for consumers. The popular one-product-per-day site, Woot, also publishes its product offers via a RSS feed. The key step to enabling feedcommerce is to allow consumers to easily create and view feed-based products lists themselves.

feedcommerce is now a firm reality. With the emergence of affiliate marketing and independent prosumer site owners, feed commerce now embraces three participant types - retailers, publishers and consumers.