Yahoo! Gives Gift Advice

Yahoo! enlisted personalization technology platform provider ChoiceStream to provide the personalization platform technology to create Yahoo! Shopping Gift Finder, the company announced Thursday. ChoiceStream sorts and displays products based on user profiles and aggregated demographic data.

The deal marks the first time Yahoo! Shopping is licensing ChoiceStream's technology, but Yahoo! already uses ChoiceStream to provide recommendations for My Yahoo! Movies, according to Rob Solomon, general manager and vice president of Yahoo! Shopping.

The beta, which went live Wednesday night, is intended to make retailer's entire inventory available for purchase online. The technology is also meant to expand gift options beyond the typical flowers and chocolate fare to include, say, a $40 Nike Yoga Kit (if a consumer happens to be shopping for a graduation gift for their 18- 24-year-old fitness fanatic niece.)

"Before our collaboration with ChoiceStream our gift lists were editorially handpicked, which was clearly an insufficient way to make millions of indexed products accessible," Solomon said. "This dramatically increased the depth and breadth of users' searches."

Yahoo! Shopping's platform currently encompasses 60 million products from over 200,000 merchants, according to Steve Johnson, CEO of ChoiceStream. "The best way for retailers to take advantage of this multi-billion dollar market is to build intelligence into their sites that automatically surfaces great, personalized gift choices from their inventory," Johnson said in a statement.

Yahoo! Shopping Thursday also launched product-related RSS feeds in beta, so users can choose to be alerted to the latest release from a particular music group or the availability of a certain laptop computer. There are currently 22 categories from which users can choose, and, Solomon said, in the future, shoppers will able to create their own categories. Users can opt to have their RSS feeds directed to any RSS aggregator they choose.

Separately, Yahoo! on Thursday announced a partnership with Target Corporation that will allow consumers to pick up their digital Yahoo! Photos prints at Target stores by this fall. The site for Target Yahoo Photos went live Wednesday night. The site gives consumers unlimited photo storage and tools to optimize the entire Yahoo! network to share their pictures.

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