API Overview

The Sovrn Commerce Price Comparison API allows you to find alternative merchants selling the same product so your readers can 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 must provide a product URL from any supported retailer and specify the market area of interest.

This service looks 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 least 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 <- searchByBarcode

IF( response is empty and plainlink is defined )
response <- searchByPlainlink

IF( response is empty )
response <- searchByKeywords

return 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 <currency>_<language> (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
To query this API, include a Secret Key in the Authorization header of your request. The value of the header must be formatted as secret {SECRET_KEY}, ensuring that the word secret is followed by a space before the key itself.
For details on generating a Secret Key for your site, visit our Authorization guide.

curl --location --request POST 'https://comparisons.sovrn.com/api/affiliate/v3.5/' 
    --header 'authorization: secret {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.