Re: [mv] building something like zShops with Minivend

[Brian DeSpain <brian@xao.com>]

Raj Goel wrote:

> ******    message to minivend-users from Raj Goel <frostbit@brainlink.com>     ******
>
> On  0, Mark Stosberg <mark@summersault.com> wrote:
> > ******    message to minivend-users from Mark Stosberg <mark@summersault.com>     ******
> >
> >
> > Hello!
> >
> >    Has anyone explored the space building something like Amazon's zShops
> > with Minivend? The basic principle is this: The site owner is a
> > meta-administrator, who oversees shop-owners, who can each sign up for
> > an account and have their own admin interface to their own products. The
> > shop owners sell directly to the website visitors, and the site owner
> > makes money by charging the shop owners a fee for posting the items.
> > Does that make sense?
> >    I looking for a pointer to some add-on software to help with this, or
> > documentation on how this has been done before. Thanks so much.
> >
> > I'm looking forward to trying this idea out with the 4.0 beta. ;)
> >
> >       -mark
>

Actually BNW is doing just that for Mini-Vend right now. We are building a set of drivers that
will allow you to upload your Mini-vend catalog to the following content aggregators.

http://www.infospace.com (Active Shopper)
http://www.amazon.com (ZShops & Auctions)
http://www.ebay.com
http://www.affinia.com
http://www.yahoo.com (Auctions)
http://www.inktomi.com
(This is one of the most important relationships BNW has. Inktomi's Shopping Engine provides
the back-end for numerous shopping comparision engines. Infoseek, CNNFn, Merrill-Lynch, Snap!
and others use their back-end technology. The total network is about 60-80 million page views
per month. This has proven very effective for our clients)

For a sample of the Inktomi technology here's the Infoseek Shopping Engine.
http://shop.go.com/
For more information on Inktomi's shopping engine.
 http://www.inktomi.com/products/portal/shopping/

When the Inktomi Shopping Engine started, it was based solely on a percentage of sales. After
the merger with ImpulseBuy they began charging a $5,000 annual fee to participate in the
network and upload your database to their network sites. Fortunately all of our merchants had
signed one year contracts based on a percentage of sales so they can participate in the
network. (They also added the Impulsebuy Network along with a Java based deal broadcaster so
there was additional value. They also found managing the merchant relationships very time
consuming.) What we have done is negotiate a contract for a mass number of merchants at a
lower rates than the $5000 annually.  For example if I can get 120 merchants together I can
lower the price per merchant to right around $950 per merchant. The way this would work is
that the merchants would upload their files to our servers, we would massage it, make sure it
looks good and then upload that file to Inktomi. This gives Inktomi a single point of contact
(us) for managing the process.

I wanted to make sure that our drivers were working first but since someone mentioned Zshops,
I thought it would be a good time to wade in. If you are interested please contact
brian@xao.com

Take Care

>
>
> --
> ========= << raj >>  ==  http://www.brainlink.com/~frostbit/ ==============
> SYSADMIN: BrainLINK International, Inc.                      (718) 805-6545
> http://www.brainlink.com
>
>                                  Visit Hindustan.com
> ============================================================================
> -
> To unsubscribe from the list, DO NOT REPLY to this message.  Instead, send
> email with 'UNSUBSCRIBE minivend-users' in the body to Majordomo@minivend.com.
> Archive of past messages: http://www.minivend.com/minivend/minivend-list