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 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…
Good things come slowly. The long awaited, newest addition to ShopLocal’s family of APIs is SmartBrand API (or SBAPI for short). This web service allows a user to query across all live retailer content for one or more brands such as “Nike”, “Sony” or “Kraft”. So for example, this new API would allow a user to view all retailers (within their nearby geo-shopping zone) that have “Tide” brand laundry detergent on sale at this exact moment.
APIs or web services allow digital content (e.g., data) to be easily requested, queried and returned to a 3rd party.
Here at ShopLocal, a lot of the growth in our business has been through helping retailers distribute their in-store promotional content all across the web via numerous digital ad vehicles and publishers. Almost all of these distribution opportunities are made possible by having rich web services available to allow easy integrations. This new SmartBrand API falls exactly in line with this existing overall content distribution strategy.
Here is a practical example of what this new SmartBrand API could enable. Shown here are retailers that currently have "HP" brand products on sale that are nearby to the user. In this case the deals shown within this expandable rich media ad unit (e.g., PaperBoy) are for the Chicago, IL area.
A few high level FAQs about this new SmartBrand API:
- REST based protocol (all of which are GET commands)
- Returns XML formatted content
- Taps into the powerful Endeca search engine that all of this multi-retailer content sits within currently
- Allows access to many filters (or refinements) that can be applied to the API result sets
- Exposes all of the product attributes (or metadata) to enable guided navigation UI/UX presentations
- Enables browsing of content by stores (retailers), categories, brands and keyword search terms
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