2008-03-28T16:01:17-07:00 Practical Ecommerce info@practicalecommerce.com http://www.practicalecommerce.com/ Copyright 2007 Confluence Publishing DBA Practical Ecommerce http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/699/Tech-Support-Application-Programming-Interfaces/#comment8188 2008-03-28T16:01:17-07:00

APIs can do a lot more for merchants than integrated Flickr feeds and blogs. APIs allow merchants to integrate their stores with third party software such as SalesForce and Endicia. Essentially, you can "plug in" functionality into your store. At Volusion, there are currently resellers who are building and then integrating with apps that send product feeds to hundreds of comparative shopping sites. Others print shipping labels for multiple shipping carriers. With an API, if a cart doesn't have the functionality, you can build it or tie it in and yet still have the security and support of a hosted shopping cart.

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/699/Tech-Support-Application-Programming-Interfaces/#comment8123 2008-03-25T17:00:27-07:00

APIs are great, but without some inkling of programming knowledge, then like the commenters above said, regular folk just can't cut the mustard. For instance, for our blog, we would love to integrate something like live newsfeeds or even template customization (non-API related), but with limited engineering resources, it just isn't possible. Hopefully the less technical can leverage APIs to take advantage of third-party technologies--GUI wrapper anyone? Richly Chheuy Mediachase http://ecommerce.mediachase.com

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/699/Tech-Support-Application-Programming-Interfaces/#comment8110 2008-03-23T07:19:51-07:00

This is a superb idea that I have tried to implement into our blog but as I have no knowledge of how API works I have to update the products manually on the blog which features a best sellers list. Heres hoping someone develops a widget to display the best sellers automatically.

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/699/Tech-Support-Application-Programming-Interfaces/#comment8074 2008-03-20T20:11:50-07:00

Great! Sounds cool. Now how do us "regular" folks go about implementing an API? How and where do you get them? Where do you embed them on your website? Etc., etc.

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/699/Tech-Support-Application-Programming-Interfaces/#comment8057 2008-03-20T09:45:20-07:00

Very useful and simple article Brian. Thanks!! Are you aware of any blog which uses APIs from a webstore to display products?? Is Amazon already at it?

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/699/Tech-Support-Application-Programming-Interfaces/#comment8061 2008-03-20T09:44:51-07:00

Great post. Can anyone comment on how to find developers who understand ecommerce/blog environments and their implementation? I am not a programmer and can't do this myself (nor do I have time) and I haven't seen much that makes blog/store interaction possible.