What Are The Important APIs For Ecommerce

The E-commerce industry is progressing and transforming at a rapid pace. The convenience and shopping experience that e-commerce provided to customers led to a paradigm shift in consumer behavior. Furthermore, the Covid-19 pandemic bought a further boost to the e-commerce business as the offline retail businesses took a major hit. However, the competition in the e-commerce industry has risen tremendously.

One of the key determinants for success in the e-commerce industry is the API economy. APIs are critical for the success of e-commerce businesses and they act as building blocks for the applications to interface with each other. What are these APIs and what are some of the important APIs for e-commerce?

What is an API?

API, or the Application Programming Interface, allows systems to talk with each other. It enables one system or application to expose its services to other systems or applications. Integration and communication between different systems and applications are key to an e-commerce business. One of the most common uses of the API is to connect the e-commerce portal to the merchant’s website to share information about the products and services offered by the merchant. Another important application of API is in the back-end systems whereby all the data and orders are stored.

Important APIs for E-commerce Business

Following are some of the important APIs for the e-commerce business:

Log In API

A login API allows e-commerce businesses to manage customer identities. It allows the customers to log in to the e-commerce portals through other websites or systems like Google, Facebook, etc.

Catalog API

Ecommerce websites use catalog APIs to enable you to manage your product catalogs. It allows you to update thousands of products within a few minutes and integrate it with other systems like reporting systems and inventory management.

Checkout API

Checkout APIs allow e-commerce to customize the checkout experience. It helps in customizing the UX to make it more appealing to the customers and increase the conversion rate. This API can be used to extend one platform’s functionality to a mobile app or any other system.

Customer API

It allows you to manage and extend your customer data with attributes. It allows businesses to offer more personalized offerings by using the application logic around customer attributes. Further, it boosts the effect of targeted marketing by marketing the products to a specific group of customers.

Marketing API

Marketing API helps in automating and upgrading your marketing in a more defined manner. It automatically adds the customers to a specified email list. You can bifurcate the customers according to the products purchased, their location, the amount spent, and the segmentation criteria.

Cart API

Cart API allows e-commerce to view, create and manage customers’ shopping carts. It is the API that handles the experience once the customer has added products to the cart and is proceeding to buy the same. It handles all the complex tasks like calculating the relevant shipping prices, taxes, processing payments, cards, etc.

Shipping API

Shipping API allows you to automate the process from sale to delivery of the package to the customers. It allows you to connect a shipping provider with your e-commerce platform as well as integrate with a new shipping provider.

Anti-fraud API

Fraudsters can do great damage to your business. Anti-fraud API allows you to keep a check on such fraudsters and protects your business from any harm or malicious intent. It scans various elements of a transaction to determine the location, proxy, credit card, or email to identify potentially fraudulent errors.

Widgets API

Widget API allows you to develop a richer customer experience at the storefronts. You can do this by injecting the custom HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into the storefront. This gives the storeowners more control over their storefront without having to change or edit the code.

Social Proof API

Reviews can help in boosting the trust of the customers. Social Proof API allows you to automate the same. Facebook likes, product reviews, tweets on Twitter, etc. all act as social proof for your product and business. A social proof API allows you to stream the social media feeds directly at your product pages and site. Social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook comprise developer APIs that can be customized and added to your site.

Benefits Of API

APIs can automate some of the most crucial tasks associated with the business. Following are some of the major benefits of API:

• Scalability: APIs help you scale your business. It ensures that as your business grows, so do your systems. You can add APIs to your existing systems without changing the underlying systems.
• Enhanced Security: Security is an important factor in any e-commerce business. Ecommerce websites stores confidential personal and financial data of the customers and therefore, it is important to protect the same from data breach and cyber-attacks. APIs can ensure security by providing an added layer of security in the systems.
• Reusability: Reusing the existing programs saves a lot of money and time. Here, APIs pose a great advantage as the APIs can be reused multiple times across applications and platforms.
• Extensibility: Apart from the scalability that ensures the growth of your business, the extensibility benefit of APIs ensures that your business and systems adapt to changing circumstances, market conditions, consumer behaviors, etc. With APIs acting as an intermediary, there’s no end to the different combinations and connections that you can make to achieve your goals.

In A Nutshell

APIs automate various jobs and increase the efficiency of the business. They act as an intermediary across different platforms, integrating and letting them interact with each other to ensure seamless business operations and better customer experience. API integrations can help scale your business and take optimum advantage of marketing. It also helps in better presentation of your business, products, and services.
For instance, one of the key factors in e-commerce businesses is how the products are presented. As the customers are not physically present, the images of the products create the first impressions in the minds of the customers. For better representation, you can implement Delete BG’s API which allows you to remove the background from your product photos automatically and generate high-precision cut-outs. This ensures better customer conversions and thus, better profitability. The ML models that power Delete BG have been trained on more than 100,000,000 e-commerce images.
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