The B2B SaaS industry is one of the most competitive. When it comes to the eCommerce industry, the competition is fierce for such software vendors. There always appear a lot of tools for online store owners to automate and streamline their eCommerce operations.
To stay ahead of the competition, you must implement a robust shopping cart API integration.
The more shopping platforms you integrate with, the greater the chances of covering most online merchants’ needs.
This article will cover how to connect with multiple eCommerce APIs in a unified way and share some tips on creating a successful shopping cart integration.
What Does Shopping Cart API Mean?
The shopping cart API allows communication with various types of store information like orders, products, customers, categories, baskets, etc. It offers a lot of opportunities for every B2B SaaS provider.
For example, as an inventory management software vendor, you need to access information related to inventory and synchronize it across different sales channels.
When you integrate with these platforms’ APIs, you will be able to get the information from e-stores built on those platforms.
What is Shopping Cart Integration?
Shopping cart API integration means establishing an API connection between B2B SaaS solutions like warehouse management, shipping management, marketing automation software, localization software, financing solution and others, with shopping platforms like Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce, Lightspeed, Volusion, etc.
In this process, the API of eCommerce software and API of a shopping platform interact with each other and exchange the data.
An Example of Shopping Cart API
There are many eCommerce APIs that are worth integrating with. Some top shopping platform and marketplace APIs are as follows:
More than 1 million have built their websites on this platform. Currently, around 3,685,763 online stores are leveraging the benefits offered by Shopify. This makes this platform one of the most popular for integration.
Shopify API allows working with products, categories, customers, orders, and other data, via its customized methods. It supports both JSON and XML formats.
2. Magento API
Around 740 000 websites are built on Magento, from which more than 196,000 merchants are actively leveraging this platform.
The API of Magento supports both the XML and JSON formats. The four methods used for managing e-store data are: POST, PUT, GET, and DELETE. Moreover, it has both SOAP and REST APIs.
WooCommerce API is also popular among APIs for shopping cart API integration. WooCommerce is currently used by more than 2.4 billion user websites, making it one of the largest and most stable shopping carts.
Having access to WooCommerce API, the software vendors can work with the data like products, orders, categories, and more. They can add, update, delete, and sync such store info with the help of this API.
4. Amazon API
Amazon currently has 310 million monthly users and 90 million Amazon Prime subscribers. Its API allows to access the info from stores placed on Amazon, such as products, orders, categories, and more.
It limits its support to CSV files or XML, requiring specific skills for integration or data retrieval.
5. eBay API
eBay is one more platform recommended for integration. There are already 177 million users on eBay, and they’re listing over 1 million products. It is popular in more than 30 countries such as the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and others.
eBay has an API that allows you to access information through XML like products, orders, customers, categories, etc.
Integration Difficulties
Shopping cart API integration can be challenging to maintain without the help of third-party solutions. When developing a shopping cart integration in-house, consider the following issues:
- developing integration with each shopping platform will cost thousands of dollars;
- it will take about a month to finish establishing one integration. Usually, it is recommended to have multiple integrations. However, waiting for each integration for your app to be developed and tested correctly may cost you potential clients;
- one of the challenging aspects of integration is when the shopping platforms release new versions. You may experience inaccurate information or data retrieved. You will also have to spend time changing the code you have written;
- there are a lot of issues with the APIs of some of the eCommerce platforms and marketplaces. For example, Amazon API is very old, and its API documentation is complicated and sometimes doesn’t provide all the necessary information. Magento API integration isn’t so easy because of the inaccuracy of its documentation. Etsy API documentation is also difficult to find, and the lack of it can cause extra development time and investigations;
- shopping cart integration requires highly skilled developers with experience in developing such integrations. Usually, they are hard to find, as a robust integration goes with significant technological complexities;
- when you manually develop the integrations, it can cause serious security threats to your software. If the integrations are weak, your system may be susceptible to attackers who may try to steal data.
Solution for Easy Shopping Cart API Integration
Now that you know the importance of having a shopping cart integration and the process involved, it’s time to find out how you can easily integrate with various eCommerce platforms.
The best solution to connect to multiple shopping platforms and marketplaces is using a third-party integration service like API2Cart. It provides a unified API to integrate with 40+ eCommerce platforms in one go without setting up separate integrations. The list includes the platforms such as PrestaShop, Magento, OpenCart, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Amazon, eBay, etc. So if you need to deal with more than one eCommerce platform, consider using the API2Cart service. It is an easy and time-saving solution for your B2B SaaS.
One of the main benefits of such integration is that you do not need to develop separate integrations or incorporate support for new variants of shopping carts when they occur. The tech team adds new versions of the platforms as they come out. The team also continues to work on expanding the range of supported platforms.
API2Cart provides 100+ API methods to work with the store data like orders, products, customers, shipments, categories, etc.
By implementing eCommerce integration via API2Cart, businesses can reduce TCO (total cost of ownership) and minimize time and financial investment. They will also reduce time spent on integration maintenance.
For you to test the functionality of our service, we provide a free 30 days trial period. Also, API2Cart has detailed API Docs and 24/7 technical support.
If you have any questions about how API2Cart can help you establish a robust shopping cart API integration strategy, please contact us.
