But, wouldn't it be more beneficial to get websites to open up an API to you, communicate to them to do so, or even offer consulting services to build an API?
I know that there are a few cart/store offerings out there. it seems to me that they would have an API.
Good question. That's because this method doesn't scale and fails as a solution to the industry's challenges.
There's companies that are trying to get retailers to implement APIs but this leads to a fragmented ecosystem. Year's past payment processors that sold "pay/checkout with ..." buttons and wallets have failed to achieve significant merchant adoption despite being fuelled with marketing spend in the billions.
The solution everyone embraces seems to rely in building an independent and neutral piece of infrastructure (an API) that any publisher can integrate and that plugs into every checkout out there. It's the missing pipes in ecommerce, anyone can use it and nothing really changes (we don't process payments, it's all automated etc) -- and conversions go UP.
I'm repeating some ideas in the post but on the publisher side it's worth noting NONE would entertain the idea of integrating multiple APIs -- one for each merchant. Did I also bring up the required combined efforts of all merchants to keep those APIs up & running? :)
So pro-scraping because it's the only way to build adoption in ecommerce.
There's companies that are trying to get retailers to implement APIs but this leads to a fragmented ecosystem. Year's past payment processors that sold "pay/checkout with ..." buttons and wallets have failed to achieve significant merchant adoption despite being fuelled with marketing spend in the billions.
The solution everyone embraces seems to rely in building an independent and neutral piece of infrastructure (an API) that any publisher can integrate and that plugs into every checkout out there. It's the missing pipes in ecommerce, anyone can use it and nothing really changes (we don't process payments, it's all automated etc) -- and conversions go UP.
I'm repeating some ideas in the post but on the publisher side it's worth noting NONE would entertain the idea of integrating multiple APIs -- one for each merchant. Did I also bring up the required combined efforts of all merchants to keep those APIs up & running? :)
So pro-scraping because it's the only way to build adoption in ecommerce.