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from eBay’s CEO Meg Whitman’s interview on Techcrunch

Q: eBay, along with Amazon and Yahoo, is now one of the elder statesmen of the Web. Do destination sites matter anymore? Whitman: My view is that, just as in many businesses, brands really matter. There will always be a role for destination sites. Eighty million users come to our destination. I think that will be the vast majority of our future business.

That said, we must be in distributed commerce in the future, taking listings for auctions and Shopping.com and distributing them to other sites. If they are not going to come to us, we are going to come to them. We are not at all averse to distributed commerce.

Donahoe: In many ways, our buyers will lead us there. We are making it much easier to bring eBay listings to your Facebook page, Myspace page, and shopping listings to various sites. eBay�s unique inventory offers better alternative [than other sources].

Meg Whitman

What type of retailers want to use feedcommerce?

It turns out a variety of commercial ‘product’ data is suitable for distribution via feeds.

• Physical Products – online stores can expose their entire itinerary of products via feeds.
• Events – event promoters can publish feeds that contain entries for events that they are promoting.
• Contacts – social networks can publish feeds that contain members public contact details.
• Travel – airlines, hotels and agents can publish feeds of travel/accommodation deals.
• Reviews – online review sites can publish feeds of all their product reviews.

Consumers want control – they can pre-subscribe to ecommerce feeds and widgets based on their intentions – and those product offers will alert them when their intention is matched.

Check out this New York Times article on “Your Personal Shopper With the Initials R.S.S.”

How many feeds should retailers create?

It depends on how they want to present their product data. For example a feed could be a specialized list of offers and deals, such as specific flight specials based on routes, dates and price.

A feed could equally contain the retailer’s entire product catalog.

Retailers will of course want to be able to track activity on their product feeds and see how they are being distributed and how the market is receiving their products.

feedcommerce platforms, which we will discuss later, facilitate this.

Of course creating feeds is just a means to an end. Structured feed formats allow retailers to easily develop and distribute eCommerce widgets throughout the internet – but you need to build this from a platform – not hacked one-off widgets.