Flexibility Continues To Be Added To The SmartDelivery API

As the number of internal and external users of ShopLocal’s APIs continues to grow, so does the importance of growing these web services so that continue to best serve all of the needs of these user bases.  Over the last few weeks, a number of enhancements have been rolled out including:

The SmartDelivery API that exposes all of a retailer's localized promotions is comprised of currently 42 different calls with up to 5 different output formats per call.

• Deal Counts: For any given shopping area, the API can now return the total numbers of items on sales and the total dollar amount of the savings across how many retailers.  This data might read like this: “12,034 items on sales now in Chicago across 78 retailers, totaling $756,048.25 in savings“.
• Custom Messaging @ The Promotion Level: Additional descriptive copy about the overall promotion can now be stored and retrieved via the API.  An example of this promotional level ad copy might read like this: “This 4th of July, your local Wal-Mart is helping you save even more money across great brands like Weber Grills and Scott Lawn products so that your family and you can enjoy the great outdoors together“.
• Category Exclusion: Now within many API calls, a preset list of categories of content to exclude can be used to filter any content returns. This allows advertisers to create a fairly static business rule type filter so that certain types of offers are never shown.  An example would be a query that was running a keyword search for “shoes” that had a category exclusion filter in place of “Kid’s Shoes”.  In this case, all items that meet the keyword search of “shoes” will be returned except any that may be categorized within “Kid’s Shoes” category.
• Promotion Types: There are so many different types of print promotions that ShopLocal converts, that the need to be able to exactly filter in on only the content of interest is key which is now available via the API.  There are currently 18 different types of promotions which include: Circulars, ROP Ads, Catalogs, Dark Period Filler Content, Mailers, Clearance Ads, Buying Guides and Virtual Ads.