Also consider making a directory, personally for me that plugin is kind of useless showing items at random, its cute, don't get me wrong but I prefer to browse categories of merchants/items. Searchable will be great too unless you're using mysql's full text search which will be painfully slow on any large db table.
The live feed is there to show that I have the database built. I am working search functionality so that anyone can browse through the entire database, and will release the HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL version in a ten to fifteen minutes :O
The live feed has a purpose though. In the earlier days when there was less than 1,000 items it created the illusion that the community was stocked with merchandise. Now the feed serves a different purpose. It helps out bitcoin stores by giving them free impressions.