As a marketer who started using Goto.com back in 1998 and religiously used the search query volume data at inventory.yahoo.com back in the day, the lack of transparency on the shopping engines has never sat well with me.

While I think we’re still a couple years off before the shopping engines release truly actionable Google Adwords-esque data (search volume, traffic estimator, referring keyword info, etc.) it’s nice to see NexTag taking a very small step in this direction.

While NexTag has long published historical pricing information, the company is now sharing data on Number of Sellers for a particular product and Number of Leads per Month. Just click on the Price History tab or Price History chart to access this information.

Here’s information for the Microsoft Zune 30GB Digital Media Player:

Hopefully this is just the start. The more data the shopping engines share with merchants, the smarter the merchants will become and the more money they will spend…unless, of course, the whole industry is built on a deck of cards.

The shopping engines have a treasure trove of information that they could share. And this data will not only help merchants, but sellers consumers as well. John Middleton pointed out months ago that NexTag displayed a ‘purchase rate’ level. Here’s the screenshot. NexTag has since removed this feature, but it’s an interesting data point that could help drive sales to high quality merchants.

I believe that part of the success of Google Adwords has to do with the openness of the system. It’s hard to comprehend that the shopping engines don’t have even rudimentary APIs. If they want to get started, they should just take a look at Google’s documentation.

I’ve said it many times - this is what sophisticated merchants are used to, so they’ll expect this of the shopping engines as well. If merchants don’t get it, they will always think of the shopping engines as a marketing afterthought.