In a recent Ecommerce Developer webinar entitled “Plug-in, Cash Out: How to Effectively Build and Market Your Plugins,” it became obvious that the usefulness of an API really depends on how well conceived and documented it is.
The webinar featured Strands Recommender Vice President Jesus Pindado and Brian Getting, executive director at Terra Firma Design and Consulting, which has recently developed an ecommerce-related API.
The term API (application programming interface) is perhaps best defined as a set of standard requests that allow one system, platform, or script to communicate with another. An API describes how a web developer should format requests for a particular service. But many modern APIs actually go beyond providing a way to request services, and demonstrate the code required to make the requests so that some APIs are actually the instructions and the actions.
By contrast, plugins are scripts that bridge the gap between two APIs or that add function to an existing platform.
If you want to get map data from Google, you'll need to interact with the API. Want to pass map data from Google to Magento? You'll need a plugin.
During the webinar, Strands Recommender announced a Developer Challenge that is currently underway. The company is encouraging developers to build shopping cart plugins and iPhone and iPad apps, by offering $6,000 in cash prizes and a trip to Spain. Participating developers will be using the Strands Recommender representational state transfer (REST) API that provides product recommendation and personalization capabilities. Luckily for the developers, Strands Recommender offers a solid, well-documented API.
A number of plugins already exist that connect Strands Recommender to shopping carts like Magento and Drupal, email clients including ExactTarget and Responsys, and ratings and review solutions like BazaarVoice and PowerReviews.
“You really need to create an extension for a product that has business potential,” said Strands’ Pindado. “Recommendations are ubiquitous. If you want to be successful in that space you need to pay attention to the UI, monitor [performance] reports, and iterate.”
The Strands Developer Challenge will continue to run until September 20, 2010.
Confessions of a Plugin Developer
As part of the webinar, I was able to grill Terra Firma’s Brian Getting about an experience he recently had building “Chimpified," a plugin that links the Shopify hosted shopping cart platform with the MailChimp email client. Chimpified passes customer data from Shopifty to MailChimp, automatically adding customers to email lists. It also records data showing Shopify-hosted sales generated directly by MailChimp emails.
“The idea came from laziness,” said Getting. “We had been exporting data [from Shopify] into Excel and then uploading it to MailChimp. Although it only took a couple of minutes it was an obvious problem so we created an app that would allow us to achieve the same thing automatically.”
Getting and his team had already been working with people at Shopify and MailChimp, who were both supportive of the idea. Both Shopify and MailChimp have solid, well-documented APIs, which helped lower what might otherwise have been a barrier to even starting the project.
“An API can either make or break a project,” said Getting. “If the API, documentation, or both are not good it can take too much time [to develop a plugin].”
Chimpified is available through the Shopify app store and from the Chimpfied website. It is also being promoted on MailChimp forums. The target market for the plugin is joint Shopify and MailChimp customers. Getting is also wisely using email to automatically thank Chimpified customers immediately following downloads, to follow up with instructions a couple of weeks later, and to remind customers of 30-day free trial expirations.
According to Getting, the Chimpified prototype took about a day to build and the full product was developed in a month, which is about the same time Pindado estimated it would take developers to build plugins using the Strands Recommender API.
