http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/699/Tech-Support-Application-Programming-Interfaces/ User submitted comments to Practical Ecommerce's article entitled Tech Support: Application Programming Interfaces en-us Copyright 2007 Confluence Publishing Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:01:17 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/rss/ Practical Ecommerce v2.0.1 Ecommerce kmurdock@practicalecommerce.com bgetting@practicalecommerce.com 60 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/699/Tech-Support-Application-Programming-Interfaces/#comment8188 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. Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:01:17 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/699/Tech-Support-Application-Programming-Interfaces/#comment8188 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/699/Tech-Support-Application-Programming-Interfaces/#comment8123 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 Tue, 25 Mar 2008 17:00:27 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/699/Tech-Support-Application-Programming-Interfaces/#comment8123 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/699/Tech-Support-Application-Programming-Interfaces/#comment8110 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. Sun, 23 Mar 2008 07:19:51 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/699/Tech-Support-Application-Programming-Interfaces/#comment8110 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/699/Tech-Support-Application-Programming-Interfaces/#comment8074 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. Thu, 20 Mar 2008 20:11:50 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/699/Tech-Support-Application-Programming-Interfaces/#comment8074 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/699/Tech-Support-Application-Programming-Interfaces/#comment8057 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? Thu, 20 Mar 2008 09:45:20 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/699/Tech-Support-Application-Programming-Interfaces/#comment8057 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/699/Tech-Support-Application-Programming-Interfaces/#comment8061 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. Thu, 20 Mar 2008 09:44:51 -0600 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/699/Tech-Support-Application-Programming-Interfaces/#comment8061