An Application Programming Interface (API) is a way for computers to communicate with each other. It helps businesses maintain coordination between their system software to increase overall efficiency and productivity.
APIs play a significant role in the e-commerce industry by providing online retailers with crucial information about their competitors’ pricing and product strategy, allowing them to adjust their marketing strategy in real time.
In this article, we will explore what an e-commerce API is and how we can develop a real-time price-tracking application to maintain a competitive stature in the market.
What is E-commerce API?
For retrieving product information, an e-commerce data API can be defined as a set of rules and protocols that extract product information, including pricing, descriptions, features, and other relevant information, from e-commerce platforms.
E-commerce APIs are crucial for online retailers and businesses as they act as digital detectives and help them streamline marketing and business operations, optimizing logistics to align supply with current market demand.
For example, suppose you are running an online retail shop in an already crowded marketplace. Now, instead of assisting your team to go through each competitor and manually jot down their pricing, you have a digital assistant. This digital assistant slowly and steadily crawls through each of your competitor stores and gets information for every minute on products, sales, and trends, feeding it back to you without breaking a sweat. That’s what an E-commerce API does – it provides your business with the ultimate advantage by delivering real-time market intelligence at your fingertips.
The Need For Live Price Tracking
The Price Tracking service is the need of the current hour for online retailers and businesses. It enables you to collect key pricing changes and optimize your pricing accordingly. Analyzing trends in pricing fluctuations resulting from holidays, special offers, or other dynamic changes can help forecast how pricing metrics will evolve.
Price Tracking also has the powerful capability to check if competitors are out of stock on any items, and if so, it can track the duration for which these items have been unavailable. This information can be used to manipulate pricing, maximize profits, and achieve a significant competitive advantage in terms of sales and margins.
Additionally, thanks to real-time price tracking, customers can secure the best deals and receive alerts about significant price drops on big-ticket items. Even a small percentage decrease in these products can lead to substantial savings. Customers can also capitalize on trend forecasting by utilizing historical price charts offered by price tracking tools.s
Features of Price Tracking Apps
Live Price Tracking Apps come with a variety of features designed to enhance the overall shopping experience for the customers:
Real-time Alerts: This feature offers significant advantages for both retailers and customers! Live tracking apps can send immediate notifications about price drops, ensuring consumers secure the best-saving deals. Even a slight change in pricing can potentially drive customers away. And without utilizing this software, it’s challenging to make dynamic changes. This is where price tracking becomes essential for retailers, alerting them to every price drop and enabling live adjustments to be made.
Historical Price Data: The E-commerce industry is experiencing significant shifts in product pricing, leading to noticeable differences within short timeframes. By tracking historical price data for various products, retailers can analyze pricing trends and better understand consumer behavior.
Price Comparison: Price comparison is one of the main uses of live price tracking apps. It allows retailers and consumers to look for the same product across different retailers or platforms. This helps retailers find out which online businesses are selling the same product with lower pricing while for customers, it allows them to find the lowest possible pricing.
Market Dynamics: Historical pricing data provided by price-tracking apps assists retailers in identifying patterns of pricing changes over time. These fluctuations often result from shifts in demand caused by supply chain disruptions, seasonal variations, and competitor actions. Analyzing these historical graphs helps in predicting potential future trends, enabling retailers to adjust pricing strategies accordingly.
Steps to build a Live Price Tracking APP
Building a live price-tracking app involves several steps before deployment. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you get started:
Goals and Requirements
Thorough market research is essential when determining the types of products or services that the app will track. This includes researching competitor applications to identify the features they offer and analyzing customer reviews to gain a better understanding of customer expectations. Additionally, identifying the target audience that will use the app is crucial, as it will influence the app’s design to meet their specific requirements.
APIs Selection
Now that you have analyzed and listed the features necessary for your application, select the APIs that will provide you with live data from E-commerce Platforms consistently without any downtime. There are both official APIs and third-party APIs available; however, the official APIs of Amazon, Walmart, and eBay are much more expensive to use than third-party APIs, and they also don’t offer any customization or flexibility with the data.
Designing the UI
After selecting the APIs, begin designing a user-friendly UI that will enable users to view beautiful historical charts, add products to a tracking list, receive notifications when there is a price drop, and easily navigate through different pages using well-organized sidebars or footer menus, as well as other relevant designs.
Integrate APIs and Prototype Testing
Integrate the selected APIs in your application and fetch the real-time data, parse it at the backend transfer it to the front end, and show it to the user. Similarly, using the fetched data test the application functionality includes price drop notifications, pricing charts, and real-time price changes.
Deployment
After completing testing, ensure that your application is bug-free and does not cause any disruptions to the user experience. Finally, deploy your application on platforms such as the Google Play Store and Apple App Store to reach your target audience and gather their feedback to further enhance the app.
Conclusion
In summary, live price tracking using e-commerce APIs helps retailers and digital businesses gain a more precise understanding of market dynamics. This also benefits the consumers, who are in need to secure the lowest possible price for their desired products. Such tools have become essential for businesses to sustain growth in a competitive environment.