API for Marketplace: Netshoes

Marketplace strategies bring more capillarity to the business, expanding the product portfolio and increasing the scope of distribution. All this by reducing costs and freeing the marketplace provider from costly and time-consuming routines. To begin with, we cite some advantages acquired:

• External stores connect to your business and start selling products through your website;
• Centralized and unique customer buying experience;
• Cost of freight controlled by external storekeeper;
• Your service profile intermediating sales and doubts regarding products from external storekeepers.

Marketplace strategies are already well established in Brazil for retail products. However, there is still plenty of room to add services for several sectors, especially when it comes to services.

By providing APIs in your systems focused on the marketplace, you make your services more agile, optimizing its use and having greater control.

You may think that to use these integrations via API within your e-commerce, it is necessary to have HUBs and Partner Platforms where they will follow their rules of use to ensure the success of product availability and maintenance of sales.

In this process, we can consider it important to have two scenarios: Test Environment and Production Environment.

In the testing environment you can guarantee that the developers, HUBs and Platforms that will use the API can simulate and understand all the internal processes.

Assuming that a HUB/platform wants to perform an integration development to connect retailers to your marketplace, it will pass through this flow.

With this, they will be able to understand the processes for registering new products and also their respective maintenance, consultation and order flow.

As for the use of the production environment, we understand that by passing through the test flow, they are able and in full knowledge of their internal processes.

With this, there will be an improvement in the use of its APIs, thus performing an optimization in the necessary changes as well.

When a storekeeper wishes to register a new product, the following validations may be available via API:

• mandatory fields to be filled in, otherwise it will not continue in the website;
• with this, its backend together with the API can perform the validation of this product systemically and thus identify if it is able to proceed in the process of cataloguing and approval;
• including flows in the acceptance of a registration, such as having a minimum amount of stock.

Still on the subject of API marketplaces, we can use the success story of our partner Netshoes as an example.

Netshoes has a Portal totally focused on developers who want to make the integrations with the APIs and also the availability of documentation and internal processes to use it.With this, it aims to facilitate the display of products from retailers in the Netshoes and Zattini sales portals, showing all the exposure structure of these products and the order management that the portals can offer, thus controlling all relevant business flows in a fast way.

The integration is done in a simple way and follows well known market standards to realize the integration of your management platform.

Through the API it is possible to register products, manage stocks and prices and have control of your orders through statuses until they are delivered to the customer.

Speaking of numbers, we can look at the following benefits and advances:

• 92% of stores are integrated to use APIs;
• 94% of revenues are from these integrated stores;
• Hubs and partner platforms, bringing us feedback and suggestions for improvements aiming at continuous evolution;
• More than 50 partner integrations;
• Exclusive channel for answering questions and problems, directly through the Developer's Portal (after all, a support focused on your business and experience in using the APIs will help to make the processes clearer and more successful, as indicated in our post)

Another important aspect that APIs can help you with is to be able to limit the number of requests that your backend/service can receive per minute, thus providing a controlled environment and consequently avoiding an overload of unexpected information on these services.

Access policies ensure that the API does not suffer from excessive calls within a certain time limit, causing instability for service providers.

Thus, using APIs in the marketplace brings as benefits: innovation, control and security. This enables Marketplace strategies as the connection forms become uncomplicated. See more about Marketplaces

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