Here are two real problems you can tackle for online retailers:
Retailers can often get product data directly from the manufacturer. This is true 100% of the time when the retailer is drop-shipping. The problem isn't really obtaining this data but the canned data you get is pretty worthless. Thousands of online retailers were hit hard by the Panda update (some time ago) because they all used the exact same descriptions provided by the manufacturers. So a lot of time was spent on custom descriptions and "romance copy." If you can find a way to offer unique product descriptions or at the very least somewhat unique then you could save these companies money.
Another problem online retailers face is categorization. Not on their own sites but with mapping their items to the various taxonomies employed by Amazon, Buy.com, Shop.com, PriceGrabber, and so on forever and ever. Find a way to provide the mappings to each of these company's taxonomies and people will pay you. The alternative is doing it all by hand, using a script to cover most of the ground and doing the rest by hand, or by outsourcing it. If I had a service at my finger tips that could have done all that for me when I needed it, I'd have happily recommended it to the boss.
Hi, I'm Shawn, and I work on categorization at Semantics3.
We use Naive Bayesian classifiers and other heuristics for categorization to help us with the disambiguation of products (merging multiple sources referring to the same product into one clean record). Knowing which category a product comes from greatly narrows down the search space for disambiguation.
We're planning to release this as an endpoint for the API, and we are currently working on fine-tuning the categorizer for this purpose. If you have any suggesetions/ideas drop me an e-mail at shawn[at]semantics3.com!
Channel Advisor solves your second problem.
The first problem can be solved with some creative mashups of data, images and videos... plus all you really need is 2-3 sentences to be considered unique content.
Just checked out their marketplace material[1] and found this:
> Category-Specific Product Mapping Template: Create category-specific product templates that use common attributes and data manipulation technology to map your product information to the marketplace’s specifications.
Retailers can often get product data directly from the manufacturer. This is true 100% of the time when the retailer is drop-shipping. The problem isn't really obtaining this data but the canned data you get is pretty worthless. Thousands of online retailers were hit hard by the Panda update (some time ago) because they all used the exact same descriptions provided by the manufacturers. So a lot of time was spent on custom descriptions and "romance copy." If you can find a way to offer unique product descriptions or at the very least somewhat unique then you could save these companies money.
Another problem online retailers face is categorization. Not on their own sites but with mapping their items to the various taxonomies employed by Amazon, Buy.com, Shop.com, PriceGrabber, and so on forever and ever. Find a way to provide the mappings to each of these company's taxonomies and people will pay you. The alternative is doing it all by hand, using a script to cover most of the ground and doing the rest by hand, or by outsourcing it. If I had a service at my finger tips that could have done all that for me when I needed it, I'd have happily recommended it to the boss.
You should charge for these services, of course.