You might remember my blog post about eBay Pop, the online tool for monitoring what is hot on eBay. Mpire, the team that built the tool, has decided to open up this functionality for every webmaster and blogger to use on their website/blog as a widget.
In fact Mipre is launching today not one but four different widgets, each offering distinct features. The announcement comes hot after eBay itself launched eBay To Go last week, which is their own set of widgets designed to assist sellers in promoting their eBay auctions.
How are these widgets different from what eBay offers?
While eBay To Go is mostly built around a single eBay auction, Mpire weighs in by offering widgets featuring shopping data analysis that Mpire is so good at. Here is a short summary of what each of Mpire widgets does:
- eBay Movers and Shakers shows what people are selling/buying on eBay. This is exactly what eBay Pop does however the widget shows only one pre-configured category.
- eBay Top Searches shows what people are searching on eBay. A product category is selected when widget is configured. The widget will display up to 10 popular search terms from that category.
- Mpire Price Check displays a price chart for a pre-configured set of products. The widget allows up to 6 product picks and for each product will display a price chart over the past month together with data on average selling price and number of matching results.
- Mpire Trend Watch displays the price trend for a product category. This widget appears to be similar to the Movers tab of “eBay Movers and Shakers” except it also shows the average new and used price for the product.
The most functionally diverse offering of shopping widgets ever
I have been testing Mpire widgets over the past week and I am really impressed. So far this is the most functionally diverse offering of shopping widgets I have ever seen.
All Mpire widgets work of eBay and Amazon database of products to display the lists/charts. In addition to the main functionality, each widget also has a configurable list of product picks which is a set of links that open a separate browser window with product search results for the selected search term. You can see how this works from the widget I embedded at the bottom of this blog post.
Since I am a stats/analysis freak myself, I can truly appreciate these widgets for what they offer. In fact I am adding the “Price Check” widget to my blog sidebar to help me with tracking prices on a couple of things I am planning to buy.
Webmasters receive 100% of the commission from sales
One more significant difference between Mpire and eBay widgets is that with Mpire publishers can enter their eBay and/or Amazon affiliate code when they configure a widget and then receive a commission from each sale that the widget generates. Mpire doesn’t hold anything back, the entire commission goes to the publisher.
Why are they doing it? There are several reasons. One is probably the fact that Amazon doesn’t support revenue sharing and unless Mpire drops Amazon from this offering, they really don’t have much choice. The other reason is that these widgets are a very good way for Mpire to promote their main website, which is a far more convenient place to shop than the widget itself. And if the visitor leaves your blog for the Mpire site, the team will get all the revenue.
And finally, I am sure eBay is already working on adding affiliate codes to their widgets (if they already don’t have this functionality) and it is probably just a matter of time before this happens. By offering affiliate incentive now, Mpire takes the lead and uses it as an advantage in this difficult competition against such a heavy lifter as eBay.
Conclusion
Mpire widgets is a very strong and functionally rich offering that will enhance many shopping related websites/blogs and will bring additional revenue to the owners. Setting up a widget doesn’t require registration which is also a plus. In addition, the widgets are an excellent branding tool for Mpire to promote their main website. I will be curious to see how this offering affects Mpire ranking in my monthly list of popular price comparison websites.
Great widget for niche sites looking to show pricing trends for specific products. A PDA review site would be a nice fit for these widgets. As for regular blogs, I’m not sure people would use these..
Good job overall though!
There is one important piece missing, and I should have mentioned it. It would be great to have the widgets self configure themselves based on the page content. But that would be much harder to implement, I guess…
Very cool website, it is amazing how smart these widgets are. Pretty soon us humans will be obsolete.