Using the Google Shopping APIs

Danny Hermes
profiles.google.com/daniel.j.hermes

November 8, 2011

Today I hope to introduce you to the Google Shopping APIs. A basic roadmap for the next 30 minutes of your life:

• What are the Shopping APIs?
• Google Product Search and Data
• When would you use a Shopping API?
• Implementation

10,000 Foot View of Shopping APIs

• The Content API for Shopping puts the data in the Merchant Center
• The Search API for Shopping gets the data out of the Merchant Center

Content API based on HTTP, REST & GData

• Upload product data for Google Product Search
• Manage sub-accounts for marketplaces
• Manage data feeds

• Search for keywords for results similar to Google Product Search
• Restrict searches by key attributes such as brand and price
• Build applications on top of product data

• The public use case (for tinkering)
• By Google Affiliate Network publishers
• By Commerce Search customers

• In such a world where shoppers are so influenced by research, you can imagine many inventive ways to use shopping data
• Can you imagine? If not, demo! If you can, still demo!

Whoa, how does that work?

• Using the scripting layer for android (code.google.com/p/android-scripting), I am able to create the dialog boxes

import android
app = android.Android()
# Get search result
app.dialogCreateAlert('Histogram results')
app.dialogSetItems([result])
app.dialogSetPositiveButtonText('OK')
app.dialogShow()

• But where does the result come from?

• Search API for Shopping feature
• Classifies results into buckets predefined by user

https://www.googleapis.com/shopping/search/v1/public/products?
facets.include=brand%3A15
&facets.enabled=true
&q=digital+camera
&key=<SEARCHKEY>

facet = simplejson.loads(response)['facets'][0]
for bucket in facet['buckets']:
    labels.append(bucket['value'])
    values.append(bucket['count'])

OK, What about the Content API?

The Content API for Shopping is Real Time

• Very fast for inserting new products
• Immediate for updating existing products' price or quantity information

The Content API for Shopping is Automated

• Feedback responses are in the same format as the API
• Feedback responses are on a per-item level
• Error responses are immediate, allowing for immediate retries and automation

Request Body containing product information formatted as XML

POST to Products Endpoint

201 Response on success

• Unique URL for each product
• Specific product operations
  • Update
  • Delete

Response body contains new product information

Test an implementation by making real API requests through our Interactive Demo

Open Source Client Libraries:

• Put multiple product operations into a single request
• Up to 1MB in each request
• Each request can be gzipped
• Response for each batched operation
• Errors reported individually
• Save on number of requests

• Dry run mode allows testing requests without actually inserting data
• All responses, errors and warnings are returned
• Enabled by adding the dry-run URL parameter
• Also available for all state changing operations:
  • Insert
  • Update
  • Delete

POST https://content.googleapis.com/content/v1/7663654/items/products/schema
?dry-run

How about implementing the Shopping API?

• Much smaller specification than the Content API
• Simple GET request, immediate response
• Consists of root URI
  https://www.googleapis.com/shopping/search/v1/public/products
  a required developer key and several other query parameters
• Response can be either XML or JSON (simply pass the query parameter alt=atom or alt=json)

• Search by item specific attributes
  • accountId
  • brand
  • category
  • condition
  • description
  • gtin
  • link
  • price
  • title

Using data to improve results:

• q - Full text search
• restrictBy - Restricting rules to restrict the result to matching products
• crowdBy - Crowding rules to diversify the products in the result
• rankBy - Ranking rule to order the products in the result
• facets - Histogram results returned for query

An example response

{
 "kind": "shopping#products",
 "etag": "\"g4vAy7M-xlr9t4iHvMv4hM4SrpU/UAeTlb_5PXTW_wtp3g-Gk...
 "id": "tag:google.com,2010:shopping/products",
 "selfLink": "https://www.googleapis.com/shopping/search/v1/p...
 "nextLink": "https://www.googleapis.com/shopping/search/v1/p...
 "totalItems": 1234445,
 "startIndex": 1,
 "itemsPerPage": 25,
 "currentItemCount": 25,
 "items": [
  {
   "kind": "shopping#product",
   "id": "tag:google.com,2010:shopping/products/3622330/72699...
   "selfLink": "https://www.googleapis.com/shopping/search/v1...
   "product": {
    "googleId": "7269998773346629677",
    "author": {
     "name": "Apple Store",

Resources

• Active online communities on Google Groups
• Search API: google-search-api-for-shopping
• Content API: google-content-api-for-shopping
• Forums supported by myself and other engineers. Answers are searchable, adding to a knowledge base of developer questions
• Docs and Samples on our site
• Search API: code.google.com/apis/shopping/search/
• Content API: code.google.com/apis/shopping/content/
• Issue Tracker:
  code.google.com/p/shopping-api-issues/issues/list