Starting today, the ShopLocal team is proud to announce a much improved way of supporting our partners and retailers that use one or more of ShopLocal’s active APIs. Instead of sending members of our development community overwhelming 100+ pages of technical API documentation, the team will now be granting access to an online Wiki style site called the ShopLocal Developer Center.
If you are a current development partner or in the process of evaluating a ShopLocal API, please send an email to apisupport@shoplocal.com and someone from the team will get you setup with the required access.
The ShopLocal Developer Center promises always on access, an up-to-date and accurate set of technical API documentation for all the the various ShopLocal APIs that is rich with examples and easy to navigate and use.
The vision of the ShopLocal Developer Center is to hold a developer’s hand when first being introduced to a ShopLocal API so as to make it easier for them to develop their own unique applications with these powerful web services ShopLocal offers. With this goal in mind, the team has added some additional resources to the ShopLocal Developer Center that were never previously available which include:
- API Examples – sample iPhone and Banner ad application with more examples coming soon
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) based on real world usage from ShopLocal’s own Client Services group
- Data Dictionary – to define ShopLocal nomenclature that is foreign to an external user, e.g. what a listing means, interest threshold exposure, etc.
The team also spent some serious time in revamping the technical documentation for the following APIs:
- SmartDelivery API (SDAPI)
- SmartBrand API (SBAPI)
- ShopLocal CrossRetailer API (SCRAPI)
- Local Offer Management System API (LOMSAPI)
Each API method for all of the APIs above now contains complete and standardized information including a:
- Short description of the API call (method) and how it can be used
- Required parameters
- Conditional parameters
- Optional parameters
- URL example to show the syntax of correctly constructed API call
- Data outputs (fields that are returned by call)
- Data output example (XML return examples)
Meeting shoppers right where they are. This principle is at the core of ShopLocal’s latest product innovation – the Weekly Ad Facebook App.
Instead of always trying to push and pull user to a specific destination site (e.g., retailer.com), smart retailer today are building out rich and inviting socially enabled experiences within the areas of the web that users spend most of their time within – namely portals and social sites.
Since Facebook is clearly the largest social site in the world with over 350 active users (see the rest of their insane stats below), making sure any given retailer’s brand is well represented within this massive ecosystem is now becoming a requirement.
- 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
- More than 35 million users update their status each day
- More than 55 million status updates posted each day
- More than 2.5 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
- More than 3.5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week
- More than 1.6 million active Pages on Facebook
- Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans
- The US represents about 30% of total users
So why add weekly ad content (or any other store promotional or deal content for that matter) to a Facebook fan page? The answer is simple. To attract and retain “fans”, retailers must meet the needs of these shoppers. One of these key needs is to get something in return for their action of becoming a retailer’s “fan”. Namely deals, discounts and coupons. There is a certain social contract at play and it needs to be upheld. The weekly ad is a great source of localized promotions and deals that exactly meets the expectation that fans have.
“When a 1,000 “connected consumers” where surveyed in late 2009 about their digital habits and attitudes towards social media marketing, they found that promotions and discounts were primary drivers of “friending” a brand for over a third of social networking users” – recent Razorfish study
So what makes up ShopLocal’s Weekly Ad Facebook App anyways? Here are a few of the key features:
- Integration of common social Facebook features such as:
- Ability to browse localized weekly ad content by both categories and brands and sort the results of these by:
- Popularity
- Item Title
- Sale End Date
- Price
- Rich metrics of all of the user actions
- Multi-channel capabilities that enable retailers to drive traffic either back to their regular weekly ad site and/or retailer.com site
- Geo-target user location identification process that seamlessly determines the user’s nearest store location. It also offers the user a method for changing their system-derived location to a new one at any time
- View an item detail layer complete with the option to view a larger item image
Important Note: This finished, private Facebook app was not paid, approved or directed by Kohl’s. Rather Kohl’s circular content was merely selected to build and test around by the ShopLocal product development team due to its representative nature. This weekly ad Facebook app demo is just so be an example of what is possible for any given retailer. If you would like access to this private beta, all you need to do is simply become “my friend” on Facebook and I will set you up so that you can view this amazing demo app.
This is the "splash" page where the entire weekly ad experience begins. Facebook currently has a really dumb policy in place that prohibits a Flash movie from auto-running. Instead they force a rule that requires that the user to click to activate the flash experience. So this is the ONLY reason why this splash page exists.
Once the user clears the initial hurdle of activating the flash movie, the weekly ad experience comes to life. Right now, the beta app starts with all users viewing the most popular products overall, across all brands and categories.
If a user wants to more details on specific offer, a simple item detail screen is shown which allows the user to potentially buy the item online (at retailer.com), share the item as a link post with their Facebook friends or post a comment. In this case, the user is attempting to leave a comment on a specific item.
Since this user has never interacted with the weekly ad app before, there is a required and Facebook controlled popup that the user must grant the weekly ad app access to some of the personal information. This is a very standard popup that happens in nearly all Facebook apps. But all the same, it is hurdle #2 that Facebook forces us all to jump over.
Once the user has granted the weekly ad app access to their profile information, the comment can be posted. Notice for example the thumbnail image of the user now appears vs. the anonymous user image.
As a nice little feature, within the item detail area for an item, a larger image view is easily accessible.
As an alternate to browsing by category (which is the default method), the user can also choose to browse by brands at any time.
If a user decides that they want to share a specific item of interest as a "link" with their Facebook friends, they can very easily do so from within the weekly ad app. They can even write a comment to help provide some context of why they are sharing this "link".
And finally, here is how a "link" that is shared appears on the user's own wall. This is the #1 action that can cause viral spread of a weekly ad offer, since now all of the user's friends are now going to see this story within their news feed and be able to like, comment and re-share it.
The much overdue and heavily request multi-retailer API (the team calls it the ShopLocal Cross Retailer API or SCRAPI for short) is finally complete and live. Application development partners Spreezio and ReachEverywhere (more to come on what both of these firms are up to) played a key role in shaping and being alpha and beta release users of SCRAPI.
Basically what this new REST based web service that returns XML data allows is access to every last stitch of content that is currently displayed on ShopLocal.com. Or as one developer said, “its basically ShopLocal.com in a box”. This new API includes access to the following types of content:
- Circulars / FSIs / Catalogs / Weekly Ads (all localized)
- Run Of Press (ROP) Ads (all localized)
- eCommerce or Online Offers
- Retailer Store Locations
SCRAPI unleashes a serious punch of possibilities and access to the entire ShopLocal database
Within SCRAPI, all of the above content is normalized and fully loaded with rich meta data which allows for the following types of browsing and searching methods to take place, all via the powerful Endeca Site Search Engine:
- Guided navigation with attribute/filter refinements
- Browse by category or brand or retailer or location
- Keyword search with all the bells and whistles that great search engines utilize such as stemming, plurals, thesaurus, search re-directs, etc
- Popularity based result set rankings along with a ton of other sort orders
So for a quick recap, here is a list of all of the currently available ShopLocal API’s that trusted partners can be granted access to:
- SmartDelivery API – SDAPI – This is by far the most used, mature and deep API that ShopLocal offers. It is currently powering many different and diverse use cases across a plethora of digital mediums. It is limited however to only one retailer’s circular/FSI data set at a time.
- SmartCircular API – SCAPI – This is an API that offers that was built specifically to enable the building of an online circular web site. It is also limited however to only one retailer’s circular/FSI data set at a time.
- SmartBrand API – SBAPI – This is an API that is all about enabling cross-retailer searching and browsing for a pre-selected list of one or more brands/manufactures.
- ShopLocal Cross-Retailer API – SCRAPI – This API allows for all retailers content of any type to be browsed and searched across.
- ShopLocal API – SLAPI – This is a somewhat older API that offers access to a limited set of content which includes some premade ROP or FSI ad viewer widgets (JSON type HTML widget) and some ROP and FSI keyword search capabilities.
- Local Offer Management System API – LOMS API – This is the API that sits behind the new, very flexible local offer management system which allows advertisers (such as local Pepsi Bottlers or Lexus Tier 1) to retrieve product, store/dealer, offer or retailer data in a systematic way.
And yes, it’s somewhat confusing and there is tons of overlap between the different, poorly named APIs. The long terms vision is to fold all of these into one super-powerful global API that allows a user to access any type of content from any content silo. One day…
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.
Proud to roll-out a new API capability today that will allow users of the SmartDeivery web service to query in-store promotional content at the most precise geo-location level: by a user’s latitude & longitude pair. This is a big step in ensuring the closest store location(s) to a user are selected by the ShopLocal system, as it removes the dependency on ZIP code centroids (and the inaccuracy that comes from lumping all users within a given ZIP code into one specific normalized & central pin point). The team even went the extra mile by building a system that allows for the two different versions of lat & long data, both radian and decimal, to be accepted.
So at this point, the SmartDelivery API now accepts the following types of user location information:
- US ZIP Code (only first five digits)
- Canadian Postal Code (only for clients with Canadian content)
- City, ST pair (ex. Chicago, IL)
- Retailer Store Number
- ShopLocal Store Number
- User’s IP Address (for Geo-IP targeting)
- Decimal Formatted Latitude & Longitude Pair
- Radian Formatted Latitude & Longitude Pair
Location is such a core input to ShopLocal. In nearly every system, one of the only required inputs typical is a location. So by offering more possible inputs, this allows a greater number of partners and publishers to access the right slice of localized promotional content with the best available user location data.
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