The ability to acquire, manage and utilize product data is crucial to the success of your marketplace. Marketplace operators are currently being offered a wide range of eCommerce APIs. What do the best eCommerce platform APIs have to offer and which of these are most suited to your needs?
Leading enterprises such as Amazon, Walmart and eBay have developed outstanding eCommerce APIs. Let’s take a look at their features and understand how your marketplace can benefit from them.
What are product data APIs?
Product data APIs are a powerful tool for eCommerce businesses that allow them to access product information and other relevant data from a variety of sources. Essentially, an API (Application Programming Interface) is a set of protocols that enable different software applications to communicate with each other. In the context of eCommerce, product data APIs allow businesses to easily access product information, including price, availability, and other relevant data, from a variety of sources, such as suppliers or other eCommerce platforms.
Benefits of product data APIs for eCommerce marketplaces
Improved efficiency
One of the primary benefits of using product data APIs is improved efficiency. By automating the process of accessing and updating product information, businesses can save time and reduce the risk of errors. For example, instead of manually entering product data into your eCommerce platform, you can use a product data API to automatically import product information from a supplier’s database. This can save a significant amount of time and resources, allowing you to focus on other areas of your business.
Enhanced customer experience
In addition to improving efficiency, product data APIs can also help enhance the customer experience. By providing accurate and up-to-date product information, businesses can improve the customer’s online shopping experience, leading to higher conversion rates and increased customer loyalty. For example, if a customer sees that a product is out of stock or has an incorrect price, they may become frustrated and abandon their purchase. By using a product data API, you can ensure that your customers always have access to accurate and up-to-date product information, improving their overall experience with your brand.
Increased profitability
Product data APIs can also help increase profitability by providing businesses with valuable insights into product performance and trends. By analyzing data from a variety of sources, businesses can identify which products are selling well, which products are underperforming, and make data-driven decisions to optimize their product offerings. Additionally, by automating the process of accessing and updating product data, businesses can save time and resources, allowing them to focus on other areas of their business, such as marketing and customer service.
Amazon’s Product Advertising and MWS API
With 310 million monthly users, Amazon has massive appeal for sellers and buyers alike. Free Amazon MWS data can be used to create listings, fetch orders, get payments, produce reports, and more. MWS API data enables sellers to increase selling efficiency, reduce manpower expenses, and improve response time. By studying eCommerce data attributes, applications can be developed to list products for sale, set product prices, retrieve information for order fulfillment, generate reports, and more.
The Amazon Advertising API automates scales for affiliates, and optimizes advertising results. This API yields campaign and performance data for sponsored products, brands, and display, with programmatic access for campaign management. Advertisers have the ability to manage ads or ad groups based on predefined conditions.
Walmart’s Open API
The Walmart Open API provides access to the marketplace’s extensive product catalog, thereby enabling digital distribution partners to earn affiliate revenues from customer referrals. Walmart is very restrictive in providing access to that API and it’s nothing but open.
Developers can utilize a variety of APIs to acquire crucial Walmart API data, promote sales, and improve the user experience:
Lookup API – This product price API features the price and availability of each item.
Search API – This product lookup API enables a text search to be conducted on the Walmart.com catalogue, which returns matching products on sale.
Taxonomy API – This API reveals Walmart.com’s category taxonomy which is used to categorize items.
Trending API – This eCommerce API features trending items on Walmart.com.
Reviews API – This API provides user reviews of products.
eBay’s Buy and Sell APIs
eBay currently has 177 million active monthly users. Its free Sell APIs provide sellers and third-party developers with all the capabilities needed to manage the vendor’s end-to-end eBay business. Sell APIs are focused on product catalogs (structured data), inventory on-boarding, and management capabilities. It employs a SKU-driven approach to manage purchase orders, fulfillment and returns.
eBay’s Buy APIs enable vendors to create buying experiences outside of the eBay.com site. Users can search for, select, and buy eBay items based on eBay API data. Sellers can mirror and display the contents of the items in an eBay category, provide marketing data to drive conversions, and track orders, all from within the seller’s own website. eBay’s Buy APIs offer shoppers the option to buy eBay sellers’ items at any location including social sites.
Optimal Data Synergy with the Cluster Platform
Our AI-based marketing analysis platform enables online vendors to achieve superlative marketplace performance by integrating seamlessly with a wide range of product data APIs. The platform constantly draws crucial data related to products, prices and competitive markets, enabling sellers to dynamically build automated product catalogs and display their wares to the best advantage.
Cluster is a platform for eCommerce marketplaces, brands, retailers, and sellers. We leverage ML & AI technology that provides the Retail/eCommerce community with demand forecasting, competitive market share information across multiple platforms, improved product matching capabilities, catalog data enhancement, optimized catalog rankings based on demand analysis and data-driven pricing.
The core competency of our technology is the ability to identify every product available online based on user-generated content (for example, users on Facebook Marketplace listing their used products), build a complete and structured product entity with up to 300 attributes as well as its regional GTINs, identify the product offerings in various websites across countries and channels and extract market price, estimate and predict sales volume per channel and even provide accurate sales-related costs such as shipping, marketing, tax and VAT, etc.
To learn more about marketplace optimization through seamless integration with Data APIs, book a demo now.
