I want to create an app for Best Buy employees which enables them to use their phones to look up item data instead of making them fiddle with the nearest store computer to do that. There doesn't seem to be a method in the Best Buy API to be able to access the sort of data I want (~exact stock count, etc.). I know how to see if a store does or does not have an item in stock, but not how many. Would that sort of data be too "sensitive", or is there luckily some way?
Also, if I need some kind of permission to access the data in order for the app to work in a single store, who would I need to ask? The store? Or even higher up?
The Best Buy APIs do not offer exact stock count for products, by store location or otherwise.
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This is more of a general programming question.
I'm trying to create an app, think of it as a Yelp clone. I have most of it working but I'm missing one important feature. The data of the places around me. For now I'm only focused on food, so I'd like it if I search something like "Pizza", it'd show me all the pizza joints near me.
I was originally planning to use Google Places API. However if you havent heard, they're changing their pricing and lowering the free tier and upping the cost by a huge margin.
There's also the problem of saving the data. One workaround I saw a user suggest was to just keep using Google's API, but every time you make the query, store the data in your own DB as well (I only need address and name and latitude and longitude) so eventually, you'd have what you need in a sense. However I also want to have something like a simple rating system for each place like Yelp, but Google (and all other places like MapBox, Here Maps, etc) states something along the lines of "info from their API should not be stored or cached for more than 24hrs" but it's very broad and not specific.
So what I was planning to do was, call the Google API, grab the 3 info I need (Address, Name, Lat/Lng), add more fields to store the rating, likes, whatever else the user will add. Then store it in my database, but that doesn't seem like a solution now.
So does anyone have any ideas or advice? Or know of a service where I can get the details of all the food places? And if possible, can anyone confirm that storing the Name, Address, Lat&Lng is a violation of their policy since in my eyes, it's public data, but something like the rating that Google provides, or the pictures that Google provides, now that's Google property.
For obtaining places you can use OpenStreetMap, e.g. using Overpass API. Since larger traffic can be expected you should run your own database(s) instead of using the public APIs.
However OSM doesn't contain ratings. So you have to combine this data with some other publicly available rating system.
I created a dummy store using Big Commerce.
It has a Pay In store option, i just wanted to know whether i can let users to check for stores first after choosing the Pay in Store option on the Check Out page and then click the checkout button? I could not find any way to achieve this.
There isn't out of the box functionality in Bigcommerce that allows a customer to choose what store they are going to pay at. You can use an app like Store Finder so your customers could find the store locations closest to them. You can do a workaround like creating shipping zones based on zip codes that are assigned to specific stores or ask customers to specify the pickup store in the order notes.
A client of mine has a service-oriented ecommerce site on Shopify and he's asked me to assist in making a few changes. I've never utilized the service so I'm not really familiar with it.
The price list was static at first since the client used the same vendor however now that they're growing - and therefore using multiple vendors - the costs are fluctuating and therefore the prices on Shopify need to reflect that.
I need to set it up so that when a customer logs on a vendor is programmatically chosen based on their geographic location and the prices (shown to the customer) adjust accordingly.
Is this possible? And if so, what objects/API docs should I be looking at. I seems as if I can easily hard code this with IF statements but I'd like this to scale cleanly so I'm looking for a more efficient solution.
I think this should be possible. Based on your comment:
Will I not have a zip code for the customer? – RyanMac
The easiest way would be to create a Product Variant for each region. Based on the customer.default_address you could find the customers ZIP code. Next step would be to use this within the product.liquid template to select the correct variant.
The biggest problem you have is determining their location. When a customer logs in, you know who they are, so you could dish out only products of interest to them. Problem is, how do you lump people into those regions? You have your work cut out there. When you create a customer you can assign them any code you want, so perhaps you could just match customers to vendors using a match on that. Lump any customers into GroupA and you show only products with Vendor GroupA, any customers assigned to GroupB render products from vendor GroupB....etc
Is there a way to query the API to find a Shop's orders with more detailed query parameters? For example I would like to be able to find an order by entering the client's name or the date of the order.
The available URL query parameters don't allow anything like that.
I realize I could just request all the orders and then filter that data, but I would rather do it directly in the API instead of locally to avoid any overhead.
Edit: Actually I just realized that the only way to query for a specific order is to enter its internally used order ID that the shop owner has no knowledge of. It would be really neat if I could query the API instead by the order "name" which is shown as the order's ID to the shop owner and the order recipient. Any ideas?
I look at it like this. Let's say you're poor and cannot afford a data store for orders in your App, but you have API access and you want to provide a search for merchants.
You get 250 orders per call and 500 API calls with zero troubles, so that is 125,000 orders. The API provides you with 125,000 objects that you are free to query any way you want. Want to show the merchant just orders with last name Smith and a line item of dingo balls with a chaser of a cart note set to "no saturday delivery please"... you can do that. Has nothing to do with Shopify, just your code. I think it is pretty easy to query orders for anything of interest, your mileage may vary.
Me, I keep interesting aspects of orders in a data store in my Apps, and then provide merchants with search results that way... cuts down on API calls, and keeps interesting facets closer at hand.
I want to maintain a database of all the products or the brands with respect to industry.
For example I need to get information about all the food supplements. How can I get them?
I am not sure all the companies have an API for their products.
Please advise
Uhm,... what kind of information? If you need prices, you can probably get information from goverment sources. At least you can here in Argentina. Other than that, I don't think it's possible, unless you somehow manage to scrape websites of all the brands you want to track.
Speaking as someone who has worked for two data-aggregation companies, aggregating data involves a lot of manual work. You find the sources, you automate the acquisition of data as best you can (APIs, file downloads and imports, even screen scraping from HTML pages), and you stay on top of it constantly. You're always looking for additional sources, updating code for sources that have changed, minding legal implications of sources who don't want you to harvest their data, etc.
Sometimes you have to buy the data, or weigh that cost against not having data from that source or scraping it manually. Sometimes a source will block you in some way and you need to either try to get around that or negotiate some terms with them. It's a viable business model, but it's not cheap.
For some products, Retailigence ( http://www.retailigence.com ) may have data in API form. They basically keep track of local stores' inventory and pricing for certain categories of products.
You should definitely check out Good Guide - an API that gives you access to details on over 60,000 household products.
http://developer.goodguide.com
DailyMed is a good service to check out if you're interested in products in the medical space.
http://dailymed.nlm.nih.gov/dailymed