For digital publishers focused on affiliate marketing, a scalable way to elevate the shopping experience and keep your readers coming back for more is critical.
Engaging features like shopping galleries and price comparisons that deliver a dynamically generated, rich shopping environment with hundreds of merchants and products are a key way to increase clicks, drive conversions, and give your readers a way to shop for the products they want, at the best price, all in one place.
What are price comparisons and shopping galleries?
With price comparisons, you can display alternative retailers selling the same product, so readers can choose the best price at whichever merchant they want. A shopping gallery, on the other hand, highlights a variety of products from one or more merchants. Each creates a better shopping experience for your readers, because adding editorially curated products in an engaging and visually appealing way offers readers the chance to explore — and likely purchase — more products from you, a source they trust.
Yet, in most cases, this is easier said than done. For publishers with multiple sites, thousands of web pages, and an untold number of product recommendations and affiliated content, it is difficult to automatically keep up to date with detailed product information for each item, including replacing out-of-stock items and communicating price changes.
Commerce Product API: A scalable way to deliver a customized shopping experience
The Product Data API lets you easily retrieve accurate, detailed metadata about almost any retail product and ingest it into any system you choose, providing an efficient and scalable way to deliver to readers a customizable shopping experience across all your commerce content.
How does it work?
Once you have your unique Sovrn Commerce Product Data API key, you can instantly retrieve detailed product information for more than 210 million products from hundreds of retailers across North America, Europe, and Australia. Then ingest that data into your CMS or any other system of choice, and use it in any way you like. You can automatically present multiple retailer options, retrieve detailed product information, update prices and flag out-of-stock items, and geolocate offers based on your readers’ location.
And, with Google’s latest product review algorithm rewarding sites with links to multiple sellers, you can improve search rankings for competitive advantage, drive more traffic to your commerce content, and attract new readers from search results.
- The Product Data API helps you collect data on any item you choose from a single, specific merchant. When you enter the product you want to search for, the API returns detailed information including the product name, brand, and purchase URL; product image and thumbnail; merchant name and logo; retail price, sale price, in-stock indicator, and more. The Product Data API is useful for generating buyer’s guides, shopping galleries, “Best of” lists, “favorite products” carousels, and other product recommendations.
- The Product Affiliate API retrieves detailed metadata on a single product from a variety of merchants. Simply enter the chosen item and the API will return product details from all retailers offering that item. Data points include the product name, image, thumbnail, retail price, sale price, merchant name, merchant logo, purchase URL, and more. Results are sorted by price, and you can apply filters to drill down into the data you want. The Product Affiliate API is especially useful for populating price comparison widgets, so your readers can find the best deal on the products they want.
Data for the Product APIs is collected from multiple sources, including merchant product feeds and merchant APIs. Depending on the source, product information is updated at least once per day, up to near-real time. Our system continually checks for updated product info, so prices are automatically updated and out-of-stock products are replaced — without making manual changes to your site.
Ready to get started?
Sovrn Commerce is the fastest, most flexible way to build an affiliate marketing program, optimize your affiliate strategy, and earn affiliate revenue.
For existing Commerce customers, you’ll need to reach out to your account manager or to support@sovrn.com to get set up with your own unique API key which offers access to the Product Data API and the Product Affiliate API. If you don’t already have Sovrn Commerce (and you should 😎), you’ll need to sign up for the Commerce Plus Beta.
