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)
The Leading Retail Circular Websites Showed an Increase of 27 Percent in Shoppers Contributing to a 43 Percent increase in Page Views
CHICAGO – Nov 27, 2009 - ShopLocal™, a wholly owned subsidiary of Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE: GCI), and the leader in multi-channel marketing services, is reporting a record breaking 27 percent rise in traffic to top retailers’ online circular sites as consumers prepared for their Black Friday shopping expeditions. Sale offers increased by 13 percent over last year and consumers responded in larger numbers and also increased their page views per visit by 12 percent. Retailers facilitated all of this as they not only offered a higher volume of promotions but an unprecedented number of major retailers also announced sales early.
“More than ever, consumers are using the internet to save themselves time and money by pre-planning their visits to local stores,” said Vikram Sharma, CEO of ShopLocal. “Throughout the past year consumers have tightened their belts and sought out deals, and we expect the trend will continue during the holidays. Retailers delivered holiday promotions earlier, inspiring more consumers to take advantage of the extended previews of holiday shopping deals and plan their purchases,” added Sharma.
Consumer activity on the ShopLocal circular sites peaked on Wednesday at 9 a.m., then again on Thursday at 9 p.m. as consumers solidified their shopping plans for Friday. The Thursday night peak set an all-time record for ShopLocal circular site activity with over 12.7 million page views in a single hour, surpassing the previous record which was also set at 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day.
Unlike last year (2008) when recession fears curbed holiday spending, pent-up demand has led to consumers viewing more sale content than ever. The increased traffic to ShopLocal circular sites is being driven by increased consumer interest and retailer marketers who are pushing more promotions earlier. Consumers visiting these sites are expected to make the majority of their purchases in children’s toys, electronic products, and continue the trend of stay-cations and home improvements.
The latest and greatest promotions from retailers can be found on www.ShopLocal.com and information about holiday shopping trends is available at the ShopLocal blog: www.shoplocalblog.com.
About ShopLocal
ShopLocal (www.AboutShopLocal.com), leader in multi-channel marketing services, offers a complete suite of innovative digital solutions that connect advertisers and consumers – online and in-store. ShopLocal’s industry-leading SmartProduct business solutions (SmartCircular, SmartCatalog and SmartDelivery) enable more than one hundred of the nation’s top retailers, including Target, Best Buy, Home Depot, CVS, Albertsons and Sears, to deliver highly interactive, targeted and localized promotions to shoppers through online circulars, display advertising, search, social media, digital out of home and mobile. ShopLocal is the retail division of PointRoll, a wholly owned subsidiary of Gannett Company.
The CircularCentral platform continue to mature. With graceful aging the richness of features multiplies. Yesterday three key new features were deployed to the the latest instance of CircularCentral live within ShopLocal.com which are:
- Related Online Offers: Within the item detail page, additional online offers provided by our great partner Shopping.com (SDC) are being tasteful integrated so as to offer the consumer a true mutli-channel experience. This also adds an element of cross-selling and discovery as it offers additional similar products to the local on-sale one.
- Synchronized Display Ads: Since CircularCentral is built using Adobe Flex 3 and deployed via the Adobe Flash Player browser plugin, all of the intrasite user actions do no cause the overall HTML page to re-load. This means unless specific ad server integration is undertaken, all of the many page views that a CircularCentral guest would generate (see past averages of page view per visit performance) would only result in one paid banner ad impression. The team has wired things up in such a way that the most every page view that is generated within the CircularCentral application results in a new display ad being rendered.
- New Backend Database: The SiteSolutions team here at ShopLocal has finally switched out the backend systems that power CircularCentral to use the much more powerful Endeca search engine that runs site search and guided navigation currently within ShopLocal.com. This is a key foundational building block of letting us expand the functionality further in the future.
Here is the default entry view of CircularCentral where a user is asked to pick a single retailer of interest that they want to explore the print ads for. Note the leaderboard display ads integrated above and below the CircularCentral content area.
Here is an item detail page within CircularCentral that depicts the related available online products. A user can actually scroll through a number of relevant suggested eCommerce offers within this horizontal carousel UI element. Also notice that the banner ads are different, even though the overall parent HTML page has not been refreshed.
The SmartDelivery framework here at ShopLocal is built all around letting a retailer find new and interesting places to distribute their online weekly ad content. Target just launched a great example of how their online weekly ad can live within a publisher’s site. In this case, within the wonderful online resource site About.com. Throughout specific and relevant areas of About.com (called Channels), the weekly ad is referenced in nicely tied in across the following areas (a sort of contextual type targeting):
Within each of these areas of the About.com site, a visitor will see an additional header tab that is Target branded and each tab is wired into the weekly ad so that if a user clicks through, the user will land within the most relevant area of that user’s local version of the Target weekly ad. All without having to leave the confines of About.com. Good for users. Good for publishers. Good for advertisers.
Notice the "Style Deals" tab in the header. This leads directly to the kids clothes in this case.
So the core Target online weekly ad is now embedded (via an iFrame) into a parent About.com page which allows Target to reach About.com visitors with their content right were the consumer is, without taking the consumer away from the site they were visiting.
One of the easiest ways to become more multi-channel within an online weekly ad site is to enable buy online linkage or to easily allow a user to add a specific product of interest to the retailer’s dot com checkout cart / basket. This post will overview the later on how setting up a one-click to buy online integration is a great value add to consider deploying to any SmartCircular site.
There are only a few base requirements that are needed to allow for this add to cart type integration:
- The retailer’s dot com site engine needs to allow external 3rd parties (such as ShopLocal) to directly place an item within a user’s cart. This method needs to be able to be documented, explained and tested
- The retailer needs to help ShopLocal understand if all items in the weekly ad should have this add to cart feature enabled, or if only a subset of the items qualify for having this additional add to cart button displayed
- The retailer needs to make clear how to construct an one-click add to cart URL for any given product
- The retailer must decide if there is value in displaying the regular eCommerce item detail page link (that takes a user to the product detail page within retailer.com) AND the add to cart link, or just the add to cart link. It typically makes sense to display both, but to re-label the buy online link (eCommerce item detail page link) to read “View More Info” or something similar and to use this as a way of connecting the weekly ad item back to the product detail page on the retailer’s dot com site for informational purposes (since many retailers have really rich product detail pages filled with ratings, reviews, product specs, etc).
Best Buy’s online weekly ad site is a great example of how a one-click, add to cart integration can be very organic and help drive additional eCommerce purchases. Target’s weekly ad also features this type of data driven, add to cart integration on those weekly ad items that are available for purchase within Target.com
This is how a category browse result set is returned with the SmartCircular 4.1 site. Notice that two (2) of the four (4) items visible in this screen shot have an blue "Add to Cart" button visible. This is all data driven logic that determines which products are available online within the retailer's dot com site and automatically creates the correct deep add to cart link
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