A lot or people tend to think that PubSubHubbub is limited to the blogs or the social web. As Etsy showed yesterday by introducing PubSubHubbub to their feeds, this is a wrong assumption and e-commerce makes another excellent business-case for PubSubHubbub!
We won’t surprise anyone by telling you that time matters a lot in e-commerce. What’s in stock today may not be there tomorrow, and the price that you see now will likely change. If anything, Groupon proves that pushing the information is key and that knowing about local (and temporary) deals is clearly a huge business-driver.
Of course Groupon pushes their deals via emails. It works fine because we’re talking about a couple deals a day at most. Tell people about your amazing products and they will buy them all! How many emails would Etsy need to send to inform their users about price updates, or new products? thousands, every day, to every users. That clearly wouldn’t work. Yet, people also buy on Etsy because they find the information about new products on other sites, whether they are the shop owner’s blogs, wishlist sites or even daily deals!… etc.
Up until a few days ago, these 3rd party sites had to poll Etsy constantly to get updates and find about new products listed. Today they can subscribe to the stream of all Etsy products, which makes it incredibly easier for them to consume the data and keep a fresh and up to date inventory. Building applications like Groupon on top of this feed should be pretty easy =). Read this to get started!
Generally, the more a service pushes its data away, the more it is consumed and the more people interact with it. If it’s e-commerce listings, making sure any developer can access them in a convenient way with PubSubHubbub will certainly lead to more revenues. Don’t wait for your users and customers to come back to your site, bring them back :)
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