Semantics3 (YC W13) Is A Massive Consumer Products Database To Rule Them All

Fair enough. General PayPal safety tips:

- When PayPal raises a dispute, they really want to see a shipping confirmation for a product, or something really closely equivalent. Make sure you have very clear records prepared to show them, and hope that keeps them happy.

- Don't leave any money in an account PayPal controls. Get your money out of PayPal into your bank, and get your money out of any bank account linked to PayPal into an account PayPal has no access to, as quickly as possible after you receive it. When the inevitable dispute happens, you'll feel much happier if they can't sit on a pile of your money.

- Have a kill-switch plan to shut down new orders going into PayPal. PayPal will often happily lock your account while continuing to take money from customers, who will then want to receive their product even though PayPal won't give you their money. Worst case, that produces more disputes; best case, PayPal has increasing amounts of your money to sit on. Whether this means another payment provider or just a "we're sorry, we can't take orders right now, can we put you on a waiting list?" page, make sure you can stop getting money via PayPal the moment PayPal screws you.

Yeah, exactly what I was thinking. Once Amazon and big e-tailers figure out they're being crawled for profits or to the detriment of their sales, you can bet they will restrict access and charge a fee. Seems like a good idea, and I'm sure many of us have thought of the same idea, but it's easy for any of the big guys to easily block their crawler whenever they wish. Crowdsourcing works to a certain extent but that's what deal sites are for.

I remember a real estate startup crawling listing prices from many real estate sites for maket analysis. Needless to say, that startup was shutdown quicker then you can you say "doh!"

Check out balancedpayments.com. It's a processing, escrow, and payouts in one API. Also the founding team were early employees at Milo.com and worked on this specific issue of SKU level data cataloging & matching.

disclosure: I'm a co-founder of Balanced and this is a shameless plug for my product. :)

I was also the head of data acquisition at Milo.com and am fascinated by this problem. I have to admit I'm skeptical this scale of product matching and metadata cleaning can be done, but I'm very happy for you if you've succeeded where I failed. In either case, best of luck.

So the terms of service answer this question in a vague way. Basically, they say you aren't allowed to use this data for any commercial purpose. But who is going to want to use this data for anything other than commercial purposes?

How You Can Use the Service Semantics3 grants you only a limited license to access and make use of the Service for your own personal, non-commercial purposes. This license is the only license to the Service granted by Semantics3 unless you have a separate written agreement with Semantics3 or there are Additional Terms applicable to your use of a particular feature, resource or other portion of the Service. This license does not include any resale or commercial use of the Service, its contents or any derivatives. You agree not to reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, resell or exploit for any commercial purposes any portion of, or access to, the Service without the express prior written consent of Semantics3.

You may not download any data or other resource made available as part of the Service, except for temporary system caching necessary for your own personal, non-commercial use of the Service in accordance with the TOS and applicable Additional Terms, if any, and not for further distribution or transfer to others, without the express prior written consent of Semantics3. You may not--and you agree not to--modify, reformat, copy, display, distribute, transmit, publish, license, create derivative works from, transfer or sell any information, products or services obtained from the Service, except in accordance with the TOS and as set forth in applicable Additional Terms, if any, or otherwise agreed in writing with Semantics3. Additionally, except as set forth in applicable Additional Terms, if any, or otherwise agreed in writing with Semantics3, you may not: frame or mirror any part of the Service without the express prior written consent of Semantics3; forge headers or otherwise manipulate identifiers in order to disguise the origin of any content transmitted through the Service; create a database or dataset by systematically downloading and storing content from the Service; intentionally or unintentionally violate any applicable local, state, national or international law and any regulations having the force of law; use any robot, spider, site search/retrieval application or other manual or automatic device to retrieve, download, extract, copy, index, "scrape," "data mine" or in any way gather information, content or other materials from the Service or reproduce or circumvent the navigational structure or presentation of the Service. Any unauthorized actions taken by you or by any third party on your behalf automatically terminates any and all permissions or licenses granted to you by Semantics3.

Thanks for the comment! Since amazon.com storefronts cover more products that the rest, hence the skewed results - this is specifically true with the long tail queries. As we add more sources, the dominance would be less pronounced :)

We did hear that feedback too. Hopefully our API helps mitigate that issue. Hit me up at vinoth at semantics3.com if you'd like to talk about how our API could work for you!