The B2B SaaS industry is fiercely competitive, no matter what product you provide. Competing companies in eCommerce and other spheres are creating solutions similar to yours.
If you want to stand out from the crowd in the eCommerce software market, you can use shopping cart API integration to offer your customers tools that will make their online commerce easier.
By integrating with multiple shopping platforms, you maximize the chances of selling your software to a broad spectrum of online merchants.
This article provides an overview of shopping cart API integration and explains how to easily integrate with eCommerce APIs.
Shopping Cart API Meaning
A shopping cart API is an interface that provides access to information about a merchant's store. It includes the data on orders, products, prices, customers, shipments, categories, etc. For every business providing eCommerce Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), the shopping cart API offers a host of opportunities.
For example, inventory management software needs to access information related to inventory, and share that information across all of e-merchants’ sales channels. Such software can get such data only by being connected to the shopping cart API of the required platform used by e-merchants. The shopping cart API serves as a medium through which the eCommerce software and the shopping cart may communicate when transferring data.
Shopping Cart Integration Definition
Shopping cart API integration means setting up an API connection between eCommerce software, such as inventory management systems, multichannel systems, order management systems, and others, with shopping cart solutions such as Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce, PrestaShop.
Examples of Shopping Cart APIs
The following are some of the most popular APIs of eCommerce platforms and marketplaces available in the market:
1. Magento API
In the e-commerce world, Magento is one of the most preferred platforms for integration.
Magento API supports both JSON and XML formats, as well as four methods of accessing and managing e-store data: POST, PUT, GET, DELETE.
Magento is used by over 196,000 merchants to build more than 740,000 websites across the globe.
2. Amazon API
Amazon API allows you to access data from the stores on Amazon.com, the world's largest online retailer. The marketplace has 310 million monthly users and 90 million paid users (Amazon Prime subscribers).
Amazon API functions allow eCommerce software to send and receive data on various aspects of an e-store's operations: product listings, payment processing, order tracking, reports, and more. In addition to such data, it is also possible to get info on seller profiles, product reviews, customer feedback, seller feedback. The system limits its support to CSV files or XML, requiring specific programming skills.
3. eBay API
Another marketplace to consider for integration is eBay.
eBay has already reached 177 million users. The marketplace is available in 30 countries.
The eBay API directly communicates with the eBay database over the internet using XML. eBay Application Programming Interface (API) allows software vendors to display product listings on eBay, retrieve info about all the products, customers, and orders, get categories from eBay, and do many other similar tasks.
4. WooCommerce API
WooCommerce API is one of the most popular APIs for shopping cart integration. WooCommerce claims to have more than 2.4 billion user websites and boasts of its stability as one of the largest shopping carts available today.
Using the WooCommerce API, developers can work with WooCommerce data related to products, orders, categories, and more. Using the API, they can create, read, delete, or update content. In addition, WooCommerce features the REST API and enables users to add and remove stocks, filter orders, and perform other such activities.
5. Shopify API
Shopify has over 1 million active users across the globe, making it once again one of the most popular shopping cart solutions. At present, 3,685,763 websites leverage the benefits of the platform.
Shopify API allows eCommerce software vendors to develop applications that can directly interact with Shopify and are available for free on the App Store. The Shopify API allows you to work with products, categories, customers, orders, etc., using customized methods created for those options. It offers support for both JSON and XML.
Unified API for Shopping Cart Integration
Now that you are aware of the importance and the underlying process of shopping cart API integration, it is time to offer you the best deal for your business.
Because of the challenges associated with integrating with each shopping cart and the number of integrations needed to cover all eCommerce platforms, a unified solution is needed for you to integrate your software with all the platforms.
A solution that seamlessly connects eCommerce software with all shopping carts and marketplaces is API2Cart . This unified API allows you to connect to over 40 platforms simultaneously.
API2Cart API allows you to programmatically import and modify data of online stores. The service provides more than 100 API methods that you can use to access a client's store info, such as orders, products, customers, shipments, categories, etc.
API2Cart reduces your Total Cost of Ownership and reduces the time you need to spend on integration maintenance. You can try the service for free over 30 days , so you can see precisely how it works before making a commitment.