Just when you thought Online shopping couldn’t get any better, Yahoo Shopping rolls out a few new features and shows us just how to make comparison shopping easier and more usable. Last week, Yahoo Shopping announced a brand new feature into their comparison shopping engine, Shop-by-Color. the new shop-by-color feature allows Yahoo Shopping users to browse for clothing and other items based on 56 different popular colors.

Shop.com has recently introduced several new features to their shopping portal and platform including a new shopping lifestyle blog (The Shopping Vine), a Facebook shopping application and gift registries for multiple stores. Shop.com hopes the new features will give customers more ways to shop and exchange information Online.

It’s Friday again everybody. You know what that means. That’s right, another installment of our BIG Thanks series. BIG Thanks is a weekly article we publish here at eCommerce Optimization as a personal thank you to sites, blogs and authors who have mentioned our site in a post, linked to us from a blog or add us to their blogroll. For those of you who have not already seen our previous BIG Thanks, you can access the archives and other site related updates in the eCommerce Optimization Site News and Updates category.

Ok, enough of the commentary, on to this weeks BIG Thanks…

ShopLocal recently bulked up their feature offering by adding in social community and networking capabilities for their users. The new social features include a profile page and the ability to search various product reviews, join community discussions on their Hot Deals and even track prices. The users profile can then be shared with the rest of the ShopLocal community.

Once a user has signed up for their free profile account, they simply login to begin personalizing their ShopLocal profile and personal shopping experience. Community members then use their account to share deals, promotions, rebates, coupons, reviews and more within the network of users. In addition, ShopLocal members can get Price Alerts that inform shoppers when products they are interested in are available at a price specified by the user.

Earlier today I caught word that ChannelAdvisor has announced the acquisition of a competing eCommerce services company, Marketworks. The purchase price was not mentioned by my source.

Both ChannelAdvisor and Marketworks offer similar eCommerce channel/marketplace products and services, the main difference between the two are their customers. ChannelAdvisor mainly services larger merchants while Marketworks specializes in products and services for small to medium sized merchants. Marketworks services eTailers that sell as little as $1,000 per month, but ChannelAdvisor’s smallest merchant clients sell fromf $30,000 to $50,000 each month. The deal will bring in 2,000 new merchants for ChannelAdvisor bringing their total client count to around 5,500 on a global basis. ChannelAdvisor states they will continue to invest in Marketworks customers and products.

We have posted about Pronto several times before. If you are not already familiar with who they are, a good place to start getting to know them would be the interview we conducted with John Foley of Pronto. They also recently announced a partnership with ScanAlert that we covered. Lots going on over at Pronto.com, their team must be exhausted.

Today, Pronto.com not only has a new tagline, “Shopping Gone Social,” and logo but they also announced that they are now the first comparison shopping engine to enter the social shopping space with the launch of new community features that allow users to rate products, interact with other users, write reviews and gain insight from trusted peers and other like-minded shoppers.

Lemonade’s eCommerce for everyone, is a social shopping network, product recommendation engine, Online merchant marketplace and shopping widget creator that launched today. The South Norwalk, Conn company just unveiled the official press release called Lemonade Inc. Launches First Application on Facebook that Allows Users to Make Money after many months of testing. Lemonade is bringing back the old time lemonade stand with their own eCommerce shopping widgets for blogs, MySpace pages, Facebook profiles and more.

Users can create their own shopping widgets to include on their sites. The widgets display items that users choose to recommend from their social network pages. Once a user has created their widget, added items to recommend and add it to their profiles, Lemonade will share a portion of the revenue with the Lemonade widget user. When visitors to your profile page, blog or site take advantage of products and offers featured in your stand you get a commission on the sales. As soon as your account reaches the minimum balance you receive a PayPal payment from Lemonade.

Man, it’s been an exhaustive past ten days for me full of vacation, a cold, work, work and more work. It’s been a while since I last posted and felt I should update everyone as to what has been going on lately with me and also some recent updates to eCommerce Optimization, our articles and the guides.

This is the third post in a recent series we have been reporting on about several comparison shopping engines who are forming strategic partnerships with shopping and search trustmark provider, ScanAlert, by joining their Hacker Safe certification program. The first CSE to make the announcements was Yahoo Shopping, followed by PriceGrabber. Today there is another BIG name to add to the list of recent ScanAlert partners.

I am pleased to announce the release of a new guide here on the eCommerce Optimization blog. The guide features a categorized listing of popular comparison shopping engines and product portals that can be used by merchants to list, display and syndicate their store products, images, links and more into different shopping/product listing services including Google Product Search, Yahoo Shopping, Live Product Search, TheFind, Smarter, Google Base, Craigslist, Etsy, SortPrice, StyleHive, ThisNext, ShopWiki, ePinions and more.

Categories for the different product portals include comparison shopping engines, auction listings, classifieds, deal finders, social shopping, product wikis and even product or shopping review sites.