It’s about 4 months now since I first read about Amazon opening up its databases to queries from web services. Some have dubbed it the Amazon API 🙂 However, it’s only now that I have gotten around to reading a little more about the service and a tutorial from Developer Shed that I fully realise what this means for the future of online trading…
… we will no longer be dependent on browsing individual websites to extract the information that we require. Amazon Web Services (AWS) as it is called allows users with sufficient knowledge of SOAP and web service enabling languages to construct their own online shop window, composed from the results of their personalised queries. Big deal you say!
Imagine that you are a shopaholic (online stores love the value of impulse purchasing on the net) and you occasionally purchase items from several different online stores. Now let’s take it a step further and imagine that all of these online stores opened up their databases like Amazon. Finally, let us imagine that some web host decides there is money to be made by offering people their own individual private, personalised shop window composed of queries from multiple online shops. Get the picture?
Suddenly what used to be an occasional browsing and impulse purchase has now become a direct marketing tool where the web host gets paid for the private page and the online stores benefit from the increased exposure. Nobody would open up their databases to the world unless it was to increase market presence and ultimately increase sales. Maybe I am wrong but I don’t think that it will be long before we start to see the first round of personalised shop windows on the web…