By Sivamani Varun, Co-Founder, CEO, Semantics3, Inc.
You might have read of Google’s shutdown of its Reader service, which Google announced in its “Spring Cleaning” post (which, expectedly, caused huge outrage globally). In that same post, Google had also announced the shutdown of a highly technical product — the Google Shopping API.
The Google Shopping API provides access to the treasure trove of product and pricing information that is the Google Shopping search engine.
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Although the Google Shopping API (GSA) was certainly less well known than the Reader, it was a critical tool used by several businesses ranging from ecommerce merchants and retailers to market research firms. It allowed developers to build highly interactive data-driven e-Commerce applications including barcode scanning apps and shopping comparison sites.
Retailers and merchants exploited GSA for several practical use cases such as data enrichment — augmenting UPC data or features list for products with missing information — and competitor price monitoring. Notably, drop shipping companies commonly used the GSA to populate their storefronts with product metadata and set the basic price, allowing them to maintain massive virtual stores, with product catalog sizes ranging in the millions. All of this could be built by just a single developer within a few hours!
All the applications built on top of the GSA will stop working after the 16th of September 2013, when Google officially retires the service. A lot of businesses, particularly e-retailers who relied on it for competitor analysis services are going to be affected pretty badly by this.
So what alternatives do such retailers have? What can they do to ensure that their applications don’t remain in the dark?
Technically-inclined merchants could choose to roll out their own data platform — build web site crawlers that traverse sites of target merchants and extract structured data on the products and pricing. This approach is usually not recommended unless you have an able technical team and can dedicate at least two engineers to work on this full time. The upside is that you control the full pipeline and can build really customized solution suited to your operations. For example, you could monitor a particular competitor to the second and ensure your prices match theirs in real-time.
A second solution is to use merchant specific APIs such as those provided by Amazon or Best Buy. The obvious limitation here is that users are restricted to prices and products only from a single domain.
The final solution would be to look for dedicated data providers, a cost-effective solution suited for a lot of merchants. The downside of course would be that these services may not be as flexible as building your own data platform, but it comes at the fraction of the cost and can be as good or better than what the GSA provided.
Some commercial data providers offer product and pricing information across a large number of merchants and an easy to use API which could be used as a direct replacement of the Google Shopping API. They also provide additional features such as higher rate limits and query quotas and add-on services including indexing of custom merchants or product categories. More importantly all of their plans come with full support, something which the Google Shopping API lacked.
With Big Data and data-driven analytics being all the rage these days, it’s a great tragedy that Google has chosen to shut down its rich Shopping API, which was a boon to many e-commerce merchants and retailers. My hope is that this article helps those who are vulnerable to the shutdown find a suitable alternate solution and keep their rich and diverse apps running.
Sivamani Varun is the Co-Founder and CEO of Semantics3 Inc., which is building a comprehensive database of product and pricing information. He is a self-confessed data nerd and loves helping merchants and retailers exploit the power of data to help improve their bottom line.
