API Overview
The Sovrn Commerce Product Affiliate API allows you to find alternative merchants selling the same product so your readers are able to compare prices, choose their preferred retailer, automatically update stock availability and prices for specific products, replace out-of-stock product offers with alternate ones, and geo-locate consumers to serve local retailers in local currencies. This will help you increase your click through rate, conversion rate and ultimately your Commerce revenue by using the provided links.
The API is designed with simplicity in mind. You simply need to provide a product URL from any supported retailer and specify the market area of interest.
This service performs a lookup into our system to find all products matching the given criteria.
This is a composite service that performs different searches starting from the most accurate downwards to the less accurate.
Depending on the provided parameters it starts by seaching by barcode, if barcode is not defined or response is empty tries by plainlink and at last performs a search by keywords.
The service performs the following logic:
IF ( barcode is defined )
response <- searchByBarcodeIF( response is empty and plainlink is defined )
response <- searchByPlainlinkIF( response is empty )
response <- searchByKeywordsreturn response
Markets
A Market is a currency-language pair (i.e. usd_en) that usually corresponds to the region where the products are sold. The Markets API allows you to list all the available markets from which you can choose Products. Only Markets with at least one available Product are returned. The market code is required as a path value in several API calls.
Markets are encoded as _ (ISO 4217, ISO 639-1). Supported markets:
- usd_en
- gbp_en
- aud_en
- cad_en
- eur_de
- eur_it
- eur_fr
- eur_es
- eur_nl
- chf_de
Merchants
A Merchant/Retailer is the entity that actually sells the product you wish to advertise, e.g. Amazon, Walmart, John Lewis etc. The Merchants API allows you to list all available merchants in all Markets. Only merchants that sell at least one product in the specified marketplace are returned. Please note that the same merchant may operate in more than one market at the same time.
Price Comparison
The API allows you to search for a specific product in our system and obtain all offers for that product. The results are sorted by price and grouped by merchant (i.e. only the best result for each merchant is returned). It is also possible to apply other filters, such as: price range, filters by merchant, etc.
The API allows you to search by:
barcode
You can choose one of the following: UPC, EAN, GTIN, ISBN and ASIN.
plainlink
Plainlink is the URL of a merchant product web page without tracking parameters (the link as is when browsing the merchant's website).
keywords
It will search for all products that have those keywords in the product title.
Authentication
Authorization
In order to query this API you will need to use a standard site API key in the path parameter and use your Secret Key in the Authorization header of the request. To learn more about retrieving your API key for your site, visit our Authorization guide.
curl --location --request POST 'https://comparisons.sovrn.com/api/affiliate/v3.5/'
--header 'authentication: secret <SOVRN_SECRET_KEY>'
Rate Limiting
API Rate Limit
100 requests every 1 second
You can make API requests at a rate of up to 100 requests every 1 second across your entire Sovrn Account. Unless you need to separate request counts by site, we recommend using only one set of keys.
FAQ
How is product data collected?
We collect product data from multiple data sources including, but not limited to, merchant product feeds and merchant APIs.
Is the data normalized or provided as is?
We normalize the data so you don't need to worry about it.
Are images and thumbnails provided?
Yes. We provide URL’s to both full size images and thumbnails as they are sent to us by the merchants through their product feeds.
How fresh is the data?
Depending on the data source, product information is updated from near real-time to once a day.
Why is the data missing or incomplete?
Given the nature of the sources we use to collect product data, some information may be missing or incomplete. There may be several reasons for this. Here are the most common:
- No information is returned
- The merchant you are requesting is not supported or is currently unavailable.
- The product URL you requested is not available through our merchant sources.
- The information returned is incomplete
- Some fields (eg. price, stock availability, image, brand) are missing from the merchant feeds
- No alternative merchants are available since the merchant you requested has not provided the information we need to match alternative offers.
- The information returned is wrong (eg. wrong price, wrong stock availability, wrong alternative merchant)
- Merchants have not updated their feeds
- Merchants have provided wrong data
Required Field
At least one (barcode, plainlink, or search-keywords) is required for each API call.