Getting Started

About Shopping.com

Shopping.com, an eBay company, is the world’s online comparison shopping service leader. Our global websites (Shopping.com, DealTime, and DoorOne) carry one of the world’s largest product catalogs and offers from more than 6000 merchants. In certain categories we also carry offers from eBay marketplaces, the only comparison shopping engine with that privilege.

Using Shopping.com’s Distributed Commerce program, publishers and developers (“partners”) can access this wealth of listings and use them monetize your websites’ traffic.  The Shopping.com API (“SDC API”) is a flexible way to access and recreate practically everything you see on www.shopping.com.

What is Shopping.com API?

SDC API (Application Programming Interfaces) is a set of Web Services that give partners access to the Shopping.com product and offer database with maximum flexibility and control.

The following is a partial list of available features:

• Search by keyword
• Refine results by category and attributes
• Sort Results
• Find Product Reviews
• Read Product Specifications
• Compare products and prices from different merchants
• Control the number of results, navigate between pages and many more features

How does it work?

A partner inserts on the partner's web page(s) software code that makes a data request to Shopping.com’s API server. Shopping.com’s API server will return the requested data in an XML document to the partner. The structure in the XML document will make it easy for another piece of software code that resides in the partner’s system to analyze or parse the XML response into logical pieces. Then the partner’s system will re-assemble the data pieces and formats them into the target web pages. When visitors come to the partners’ websites, they will see products or offers that are dynamically generated by Shopping.com API.

Should I use SDC API or Widget?

• To use the API you will need to know exactly which pieces of data you need (product specifications, offers from certain categories, and so on), and have programming skills to extract that data from the XML and create a useful presentation for your users. It gives you the most flexibility and power to create any page the way you want.
• Partners will no longer be able to create Widgets starting November 17th, 2009, and the Shopping.com Widget program will be completely discontinued on January 4th, 2010. 

Enrolling in the SDC API Program

Before you can access the Shopping.com API,you will need to enroll and create an account at https://partners.shopping.com/app. You will be asked to provide information about yourself or your business and how you want to get paid (options include through your PayPal account and by check). If your application is approved, you will receive a welcome e-mail telling you how to activate your account, and providing you with your API details.

What is API Key, Tracking ID?

• API Key is a required parameter in your API queries. It is used for safety, so that no one else can pretend to be you making calls to Shopping.com API. (this is only required for API 3)
• Tracking ID is a required parameter in your API queries. Shopping.com uses the Tracking ID to assign credit to partners for leads sent to merchants. You can have more than one tracking ID, for example, if you have different websites or campaigns that you wish to monitor separately (in API 2 it is known as Linkin ID.)

What is the URL for the production version of API v3?

When you are ready to move your integration from development/testing to production, please change 'sandbox.api.shopping.com' to one of the following domains in your request URLs:

European markets: 'publisher.usa.api.shopping.com'

US/Australian markets: 'publisher.usb.api.shopping.com'