eCommerce technologies have seen a prodigious progression. Since the inception, a long journey has been covered so far, where you can now order services of daily needs like plumbing, cabs, teaching, etc. on the Internet. Matrix Marketers is an early software development company providing scalable eCommerce solutions. Today, we use e-wallets for the easy online transactions. The desktop has been replaced by a smartphone and the way we started has completely modified.

API is the backbone for building such a strong system where online shopping using more than one device and the platform has become possible. API acts as a bridge between two systems which help them communicate with each other and share necessary data to complete the action.

To have more knowledge, Big eCommerce websites use inventory management systems and the values of its different attributes change according to the number of orders generated. Similarly, numerous Apis targeting different factors such as order status, billing, shipment, product catalog, etc. make eCommerce a much better and successful venture. In all, APIs act as that driving force behind the exchange of data between systems, cloud, and applications which will give an enormous thrust to your retail business. In this post, we are discussing a number of ways by which we can do effective online retailing

#API Crawler – A target oriented search

Suppose there were no search bars on its site and you would have to scroll through pages to search a specific item amongst thousands of similar ones. The customers would have easily given up. To avoid such a situation, the well-established e-tailers apart from the big fishes such as Amazon, eBay, etc. are already using crawler APIs for a custom search on their site.

# Social Media APIs – Signs of trust to share with your customers

Social shopping is an upcoming eCommerce trend. With artificial assistants and chatbots aiding online retailers in conducting business through Social Media, we are for the need of explaining what social presence can do for businesses.If you are new in the world of eCommerce, you can use APIs to stream the social media feeds on your site.

# Marketing Automation API – No need to drill down the email lists

The worst thing about the millennial era is that you constantly need to prove yourself. Once proved is apparently not enough. Thus, marketing has become the God of the businesses conducted today. If you know how to sell, you are safe even if your product is not up to the mark, but if by any chance you are an amateur at peddling your products, there is a higher probability of failing irrespective of the product’s quality. Yeah, bitter truth! You may need to suffer a lot if you belong to the clan who hates marketing.

# Anti-Fraud APIs – Identifies fraudsters immediately

Fear of fraudsters is a two-way feeling when eCommerce is concerned. Both the parties, the seller as well as the buyer fear of getting scammed. Well, as a seller, it is you who need to convince the customers that you are legit. And, also as a seller, it is again you who need to find out whether the buyer is authentic or not.

All the information that a customer feeds into your website is verified by an anti-fraud algorithm to pick out behavior while making a purchase.

Anti-fraud APIs follow financial updates as well as credit card scams to make it a reference when similar behavior is observed by its algorithm.

# Price APIs – Comparing prices of products with competitors

If you are already a store owner on the web, you may know how fickle can your customers be. Customers forget about your store being their favorite one as soon as they see the same product at a lesser price on your adversary’s site.

The only way to stand tall through the cut throat competition amongst online retailers is to strategize your selling ideas better than the other sites. Price comparison API is the answer to these eCommerce issues. All you need to do is link the product catalog to a price comparing API and it will automatically generate reports that compare your prices with the pricing level of your competitors. This API helps a great deal during Holidays when sales are expected to skyrocket as it is crucial to not have a huge gap between prices during peak seasons.

# APIs for Shipping– Makes the tracking of orders possible

Shipping is that major factor of the E-commerce world which can make or break your online business. The shipping API can be activated after the purchase is complete on site to prompt the registered seller that a certain product should leave the supplier’s warehouse and reach at the specified address.

# Product Data APIs – A much-needed API especially if you have a B2B e-commerce software

Coding and querying have always a greater impact on retrieval of data from the database. Product data APIs simplifies these tasks at the time of eCommerce Software integration. This API retrieves product details from the global database or inventory management system.

The product details that this API fetches and displays include brand images, product description, exact product titles, specifications and availability of the products. Auto-populating the catalog content becomes easier with these APIs.

# Affiliated APIs – Latest applications which you access might be using it

There are online stores which simply lists the prices or talk about certain products on their websites, especially bloggers and vloggers. These are like a mini store of its own. Many times, while you are using eCommerce services, you are using Amazon’s Affiliate APIs.

# Recommendation Engine APIs- Suggestions that change your business game

This API can work on your website and can also help you build a potential marketing list. The API is used to increase the visibility of many associated products affecting the sales directly.

# Customization of APIs – Suggested Changes

Yes, we did talk about product recommendations in the previous API description. However, 2017 is going to be more about personalized selling other than anything. Personalization APIs keep track of your visitor’s online behavior, their pattern of preferences, and everything that can be connected back to your online store.

It analyzes the customer’s interest on the basis of his online searches, social media reactions, visits and clicks on other online stores and accordingly sends recommendation e-mails. These APIs use complex algorithms which enable reordering of products on the website according to the customer’s potential interests targeting sales more confidently.

As this APIs track not only the customer’s previous purchases and current clicks on eCommerce sites but also monitor social media interests and other searches, they work on point to make better conversions. Indeed, these APIs make more than mere suggestions.

Conclusion

Deciding whether to use these APIs or not is something that may take a while for you to decide but the fact remains that eCommerce businesses which do not consider using APIs are not here to stay. It has become inevitable to use application program interfaces to stay in the business. Matrix Marketers suggests using specific APIs for your eCommerce venture to become successful. Now the more pressing issue about APIs is its characteristics and which one to choose. Hire our developers who would select the best suited APIs as per your requirement.