In this chapter, you will learn more about: Google products Google Analytics, and its benefits for e-commerce sites Amazon web services eBay developer center Google products Google has a
Trang 1Interacting with Web Services
There are a number of web services available that we as developers can interact with
to either help make tasks easier for us, or to help us to target new markets Now, we
will investigate a number of these web services and APIs In this chapter, you will
learn more about:
Google products
Google Analytics, and its benefits for e-commerce sites
Amazon web services
eBay developer center
Google products
Google has a product search feature, which allows users to search specifically for
products using the Google search engine Products can be added to this search
engine using the Google merchant center
The Google merchant center is an area where online retailers can list (and manage
these listings) their products for including in the Google product search Google
merchant center is a specialized section of Google base: a search area that was
designed for allowing anything to be added to the Google index—documents,
notes, products, events, and so on, essentially anything that generally wasn't
in a web page As this service grew, the products aspect was spun off into the
merchant center
Apart from being able to manually add products, we can also add a feed of products
This feed of products would be tied directly to our store, updating in real time as we
added new products, removed older ones, and updated details By adding a feed,
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Trang 2To get started with the Google merchant center, we need to sign up, or sign in at
http://www.google.com/base/
Adding the feed to the Google merchant
center
Within the merchant center, we can click on the Data feeds link on the left-hand side,
and then on the New Data Feed button to create a new feed Here we can set:
The Target country to determine who would see results from our feed
The Data feed type (googlebase)
A name for the feed, that is, the Data feed filename (for example feed.xml)
After adding the feed to the Google merchant center, we set an update schedule
Setting an update schedule
The update schedule is where we actually tell the Google merchant center where our
feed of products is, and how often it should be updated When we have added our
feed to the center, there is a link next to it under the Upload schedule column called
Create If we click on this, we will see the Scheduled Upload form This form allows
us to select:
How frequently we wish to upload the feed: Daily/Monthly/Weekly
When we want to update the feed (for example, day 15 of every month)
Our time zone
The URL of the feed
Creating the feed
To be able to actually create the update schedule we discussed, we need a product
feed We could use a tab-delimited feed, which would be easy to do using a
spreadsheet program If we did it this way, we would need to create and
upload the feed manually—something we don't want to do
XML is a standard way of representing data, and is particularly useful when
interacting with web services
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Trang 3Product feed controller
We could create a product feed controller, which generates the feed for us One
requirement for XML feeds in the Google merchant center, is that they end in xml,
so we would have the controller search the second bit of the URL (for example,
productsfeed/latest.xml) split the string by the dot, and then depending on the
first word, here latest, display the relevant feed
The controller would build a query of products, cache the results, and store them as a
template variable, which would go into the XML template for the data feed
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="2.0"
xmlns:g="http://base.google.com/ns/1.0"
xmlns:c="http://base.google.com/cns/1.0">
<channel>
<title>Juniper Theatricals Product Feed</title>
<link>http://www.junipertheatricals.test</link>
<description>
Theatrical supplies, props and costumes
</description>
<! START items >
<item>
<title>{name}</title>
<link>
http://www.junipertheatricals.test/products/view/{path}
</link>
<description>{description}</description>
<g:image_link>{image}</g:image_link>
<g:price>{cost}</g:price>
<g:condition>new</g:condition>
<g:id>{ID}</g:id>
<c:retail_price type="decimal">{cost}</c:retail_price>
<c:promo_offer type="boolean">false</c:promo_offer>
</item>
<! END items >
</channel>
</rss>
This is an XML feed showing some basic information for products We can define
our own custom elements to this too if we wish, such as how the product could be
customized, if it is a downloadable product, if we can upload an image, the delivery
Trang 4Other useful link
For information on data feed specifications, visit
http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/topic.py?topic=24946
Alternative—Google Base Data API
In addition to adding feeds to the merchant center, we can also add products directly
from our framework if we wish We could do this using the Google Base Data API
(http://code.google.com/apis/base/) Further details on inserting, updating,
and deleting data items using this API are available at http://code.google.com/
apis/base/starting-out.html#insupdel
Others
We've discussed Google quite a bit here; they are a very big player in this arena,
being one of the most popular search engines around There are some other options
available, and these have their own specifications for data feeds, which are also
supported by the Google merchant services center These feed types include:
shopzilla
shopping.com
Google Analytics
Another Google offering is Google Analytics, a useful web-based application for
monitoring website analytics, such as visitor numbers, visitor lengths, popular pages,
sources of traffic, and so on
One particularly useful feature within Google Analytics for us is its e-commerce
functionality At minimum, we could add some code to indicate an order has been
placed; this would allow us to look at data such as how many visits it took to make a
purchase We can of course go into more detail, supplying other information such as
how much the order was for, and so on
Google Analytics works by having a small piece of JavaScript inserted at the bottom
of every page on our site
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Trang 5Signing up
To sign up for Google Analytics, we simply need to:
1 Visit http://www.google.com/analytics/ and sign up
2 Click on Add Website Profile».
3 Enter our web address
4 Copy the tracking code generated, and put that into our website's footer
5 View the profiles list, and click on Edit for our website profile.
6 Under Main Website Profile Information, click on Edit.
7 Select Yes, an e-commerce Site.
We now have an account set up for e-commerce, and the tracking code is installed;
next we need to track e-commerce transactions
Tracking e-commerce
To track e-commerce sales in our store, we can record transaction details and item
details, and then submit this information to Google Analytics
The information is all captured into a JavaScript function call, which sends the
data to the Analytics' server The following JavaScript needs to go after the
pageTracker._trackPageview(); from our initial tracking code
Add transaction
To add the transaction, we must at least store:
The order ID
The total cost of the order (excluding shipping)
We can also record:
Affiliation or store name
Tax costs
Shipping costs
Customer's city
Customer's state or province
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