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Using Data Assist and API calls.

Thread began 10/01/2009 9:16 am by bradford.giosa | Last modified 10/07/2009 2:29 pm by Eric Mittman | 1546 views | 3 replies |

bradford.giosa

Using Data Assist and API calls.

Sorry for the long post..
I have a few (20 or so) domains hosted on a shared server separate from my ecommerce store front site.
These domains contain just an index.html page and a few short paragraphs of seo content. All the outbound links on these pages (sites) are strictly relevant only to the products / categories they link to in to my ecommerce store. (www.turboboostgauges.com if that was confusing)

I want to started using these "splash / landing domains" (for lack of better terminology) as they are starting to pick up increasing organic traffic from the 3 major engines. Because of their keyword relevance as well as the domain names alone.
I have been finding (through G-Analytics) that these are also driving revenue as visitors are starting to convert more and more...

The problem I have with the sites is that my ecommerce provider supplies me only with a "remote add to card script." Which is just a form POST method and action that follows to the drop the appropriate product the customer clicks to their cart.

That's amazing!

But with 20+ domains and over 600 products it would be pointless for me to develope those pages using that script.

All of the product data that is important and essential to a visitor converting to a customer, (price, image, description, msrp) would all be static and then would have to be redone as soon as one attribute was changed.

However my provider does supply a public API.. I already have a token, but I do not know SOAP and XML to connect to it.

What I am hoping for is it that I will be able to learn how to script a connector application to dynamically "call" and return the current product information (price, image, etc) from the API and then use DataAssist to insert the called information to my shared hosting database.

Does it seem feasible or necessary even to go a couple steps farther and setup a MYSQL database (on the shared host)? Then develop a script that uses chronjob, per say, to periodically automate and crawl the inventory via the API for changes and updates. When it finds new / modified product info it would insert / update a recordset. Thus replicating my inventory to the MYSQL DB would allow me to have dynamic, current and up to date date product information all the time.

How would I go about starting this rather daunting task??

Any help would be appreciated..

Thanks in advance.

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Eric Mittman

This sounds like a tricky situation to be in. If the product info on the site is static storing it in a db with DataAssist would just allow you to have your own personal copy of the info. Unless you can get the product details to come from this db it will not change the nature of the sites and the products on them and updates will still be done manually to static items.

Your idea about creating a cron job to run the script regularly would definitely help to ensure that your copy of the info in your db is up to date.

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bradford.giosa

Yes I understand the information in the DB will be static. But that is the reason I want to develop an API application via PHP to retrieve product information from my ecommerce site inventory db. This would retrieve updated pricing / images / descriptions regularly (via chronjob) from my real time ecommerce site and insert them into the secondary product information db.

I just do not know how to code the php to make API calls...

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Eric Mittman

If you do not have access to your ecommerce site inventory db then this would help you to create your own db for the info. However getting it coded properly will require some advanced development that is not offered by WebAssist. If you would like some assistance from a developer the job board is a great place to post this info to.

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