Enhance your scripts with our new Affiliate Product API’s:
ShareASale is launching two new and highly anticipated API tools for our platform that tech-savvy Affiliates will love. Today, I’ll cover the first – getProducts.
Although datafeeds provide a great way for Merchants and Affiliates to sync up product information, what about querying for specific products at any time? The getProducts API allows you to do just that without downloading and parsing large files, or having FTP access.
Here’s a screenshot of the documentation, but you can login to your account and visit Tools >> Affiliate API to see the complete run-down.
Note a couple unique options here – merchantID and excludeMerchants. The former is great for specifying one Merchant to return product results. The latter allows you to avoid products from Merchants you don’t want.
The data returned is a combination of product and respective Merchant details. If you know ShareASale datafeeds, the first 51 datasets should look familiar. These are the product details.
The final 19 datasets are Merchant-oriented and give you an idea about the Merchant selling this item. You could use it to evaluate whether you want to feature the product, based on the Merchant’s ability to convert traffic, their reversals, average commission, ShareASale rank, etc. Perhaps the API returns two very similar products, but one Merchant has much stronger program stats, so you choose to feature it instead.
In addition to adding a number of new calls to our API, we have also updated the way that API credits are issued. Credits are now issued based on account performance. You will always have at least 200 credits per month, as before, and as you earn commissions additional credits will be assigned per month.
Stay tuned until next week for information on the other Product API, merchantSearchProduct. It will return Merchants based on product keywords, even if you haven’t joined their program yet!
Andhi says
February 15, 2013 at 8:21 pmHello Ryan,
This is a great news, but there is a question about the PRODUCT SEARCH API. What about the limitations? query?
Regards,
Andhi
James says
February 17, 2013 at 7:12 pmIs the API limit is still 600 per month?
It would be very difficult with that limit. A decent limit would be 2500 per day.
Brian Littleton says
February 18, 2013 at 2:54 pmHey guys – if you have specific applications or questions, please submit a ticket from within your account with a good description on your plans to utilize the API – we can review from there.
Edwin says
February 19, 2013 at 10:06 amI agree with the limit. I see the requests for the GetProducts are also calcualted in the limit which for me is even at only 200 a month which is fine for reporting as 10 times a day checking how much you earned is way to much for most of us.
But finding products, and what about updating prices, thru the API is at for instance at Amazon at 1 request per second as a limit.
Now I would not ask that much but I strongly suggest to change this for all and not as an on request only.
Main reason why is becuase I and I think I will not be the only one am a developer of WordPress plugins and till now I only focused on Amazon becuase they allowed product searches but with this very warm welcomed addition of the Shareasale API I will include this much more in my products and thus help affiliates build sites with products from Shareasale merchants
Thanks,
Edwin Boiten
Mark the Wordbay Guy says
August 26, 2013 at 9:32 amYes, I echo all of the above – it’s very welcome news that we can now search Shareasale for products and use the data in our apps, but if 400 credits (as it currently says in my account) refers to 400 calls, that is really tiny – prices can change several times a day, how do we refresh say 200 pages of different products several times a day with only 400 calls a month! Even just developing software to access the API, I can get through dozens of calls per day while I write and test the software. Not complaining, just trying to impress on you how much more leeway we are going to need, and how much more server capacity you will need :)
Brian Littleton says
August 26, 2013 at 5:59 pmI’d recommend using the datafeeds for pricing, and then making calls to see if the datafeeds have been updated.
If the datafeed hasn’t been updated, then making a call to the API will not do you any good to “check the price”. As… it will still be the same as when you imported it with the datafeed.
Mark the Wordbay Guy says
August 27, 2013 at 4:27 amI guess… if prices are only updated every 24 hours anyway, both on the web service and in the feeds, then it makes no difference. But I code apps for small-time web site owners – web APIs are ideal for grabbing small amounts of data more frequently. Automating use of datafeeds involves scheduling regular downloads of the files and batch-dumping them into a database, which can involve tens of thousands of records and just shouldn’t really be done on shared hosting, which most of these end-users are on, as it is too CPU intensive even when coded carefully. It’s so much simpler and more lightweight just to grab “ipad 2” info amounting to just a few records, every x hours, and just cache that locally. Well, just letting you know my thinking as someone who writes WordPress plugins and things – Amazon, eBay and to an extent CJ web APIs make it straightforward to achieve what we want as they are reasonably generous with server calls and we can just grab a small set of the data we want in the interval in which they specify (e.g. Amazon allows caching of price info for up to an hour without an additional timestamp/disclaimer).
sagar says
November 12, 2013 at 9:01 pmCoupon data feed API are available? let me know how to get and also limit per month.