Chess Sets and Chess Sales

Have you noticed these one page chess stores such as the UK Chess Store ChessBaron? Well, not actually one-page. But through RSS feeds all the store’s products are displayed on one page, so where the feed occurs it’s just one page. You then visit the chess store through one of the many hyperlinks available in the feed. Many feed web sites now display stores like this across many industries (i.e. not just chess). Don’t know what I’m talking about? Wanna see some examples besides the one above?

Try the US chess store ChessBaron - their one-pager is displayed in many feeds, and one example is here at the Improve Chess site. The UK ChessBaron is a little bigger because of the larger inventory the UK has. This UK chess store is probably the largest in the UK, probably Europe too - the range is very large. The pages for these chess store feeds take a while to load because thumbnails of their entire product catelog have to load, but the results are microcosm of the stores themselves in places other than the actual web address of the store. Cool huh?

 I’ve noticed that this concept has started to be exploited by companies selling other items too (well, let’s face it, chess aint gonna be first!), and where items can be added to the shopping cart too - something that would be a significant improvement to a simple RSS feed. Currently these one-page displays are just a glimpse of the site/store itself. You can’t buy from the store at the place the feed is shown, nor can you see contact details, where the store is, and what the returns policy (for example) is. You have to go to the original site for that. But the one-page chess store displays (such as the examples above) all the products retrieved from the store’s database, as a microcosm to get an idea of the quality of the goods. I wonder if the phenomenon will last? It’ll last as long as RSS lasts!