New Partners Welcome – Introducing The ShopLocal Developer Center

Posted on 22 January 2010 by Patrick Flanagan 1 Comment

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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)