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…
Thanks to Getting Finances Done for writing a nice blog article about one of the best price comparison websites (if we do say so ourselves), www.ShopLocal.com.
Getting Finances Done says that they use ShopLocal.com to browse through the actual circulars page by page or search by item. “I use ShopLocal very frequently for items that I don’t want to pay shipping on or that I want right away. I will also buy locally vs online when I want the option of returning the item to the store if I have problems or aren’t satisfied,” says the author.
They also created a basic video with audio commentary explaining how they use ShopLocal.com. Thanks again to Getting Finances Done for the post about ShopLocal.com.
All things deals, sales and coupons are red hot and the smart folks over at Gannett Digital has been listening to this ever growing consumer demand. So a combined team from ShopLocal, Planet Discover and Gannett Digital has been working together over the last few months to create a streamlined and consolidated “deals” experience for nearly all of the local newspaper.com sites that Gannett operates.
The result of this effort is visible at deals.desmoinesregister.com which does a great job of bringing together many different types of deals all under one unified site. From a user’s point for view, this is absolutely the right move, as it consolidates local deal content that was previously fragmented all across the newspaper.com site and wraps it up in a searchable and browseable manner.
The types of content that are available in these deals sites to shoppers include:
The Des Moines Register just launched the first of many new local deals sites. This is the main entry page of the deal site. All of the dynamic, localized data that appears in the "Sunday deals all week long" section comes from ShopLocal's SmartDelivery API including the three most popular circular front cover images for that market.
From the 'Weekly Deals' link in the top menu bar, a user is taken into the familiar CircularCentral flash based user interface that allows a shopper to browse all of the newspaper ads online in one easy to use location.
To help drive awareness and traffic to local market ROP advertisers, Canwest and ShopLocal are launching a new a new product called ‘Zoom To My Ad’. Essentially this expandable Adobe Flex based display ad grabs a set of random ROP advertisers to feature every single impression that it is served. It was built in a way to use the standard IAB display ad inventory, which will allow Canwest to serve these ‘Zoom To My Ad’ promotions through their standard publisher ad server.
Unexpanded leaderboard featuring a random selection of ROP ads for a specific Canwest newspaper web site
Expanded leaderboard which dynamically re-sizes its vertical dimension to adjust to the size & format of the ROP ad that is being "zoomed" to
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.
(4.00 out of 5)
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