The contemporary era of eCommerce demands online businesses to be competitive and be a step ahead of their competitors. To thrive between customers' growing expectations, merchants need to be productive, efficient, and seamless while carrying out their eCommerce transitions. Such a scenario raises a major concern regarding the suitability of SaaS solutions to withstand the evolving eCommerce environment.
Therefore, it is the need for software providers to rethink their business model and embrace changes to boost their business. One of the crucial steps in this journey is to establish an integration between eCommerce platforms on which the merchants have their e-stores and the eCommerce software.
For instance, millions of merchants have built their stores on PrestaShop. Therefore, data integration with this platform will be beneficial both for merchants and software vendors who are willing to take their SaaS business to new heights. So, to answer your question, if PrestaShop integration is worth implementing or not, we have come up with everything you should know about the platform, the process, and the easiest way to integrate with the platform.
Keep reading!
Key Facts about PrestaShop REST API
PrestaShop was founded 12 years ago and has built more than 723 thousand online stores under its name. It is a powerful eCommerce solution which more than 318 thousand active members trust. Moreover, it is available in more than 200 countries across the globe. Therefore, PrestaShop integration has a lot of benefits for eCommerce software vendors, considering the number of prospective clients they will be targeting with this integration.
Take a look at more detailed information on PrestaShop and its API.
PrestaShop API features four most important methods for software vendors and developers to work with data stored on its platform. These methods include GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE, which are functions for performing tasks like Retrieving, Creating, Updating, and Deleting data, respectively, from the online stores. eCommerce software depends on these methods to manage the data of online PrestaShop stores.
PrestaShop API is based on REST architecture. It supports both XML and JSON formats and uses HTTP requests for data transfer. To create a data resource on PrestaShop, you need to GET blank data for the resource, which is in XML, and then make the necessary changes. After making these changes, you can send the POST request (HTTP) using XML.
Similarly, if you want to update an existing resource, you need to GET the full XML file of the resource being updated. Then, you will be able to send a PUT request (HTTP) with your XML file.
PrestaShop Integration Challenges
PrestaShop integration is a tedious process. It has many challenges associated with it. Take a look.
- PrestaShop integration is time-consuming. It takes almost a month to develop a single integration with PrestaShop. This time includes the sequence tasks such as - time taken by your developer to learn the PrestaShop architecture and API logic, investing efforts in reducing the friction between the product and system, and more such activities.
Moreover, if you need multiple eCommerce integrations, you can imagine how long it will take you to develop them.
- PrestaShop integration is a costly affair. Every integration costs around 4000 dollars. Such money can be invested in several other business processes. These thousands of dollars are many expenses. They include hiring, training, and onboarding developers, developing the integration infrastructure, resources, after maintenance and upgrades of the integration, etc.
Added to this cost is the cost of all the integrations you will be establishing with PrestaShop. Considering both the time and money required for establishing integrations, you will start losing clients at such a rate.
- PrestaShop integration requires regular updates and maintenance. Not only with PrestaShop, but other integrations need to be updated as per the changing requirements of eCommerce platforms’ APIs. Integration is a dynamic process. New cart versions are constantly released for security purposes, so you need to upgrade your integrations to comply with them.
Such upgrades and maintenance tasks would need the same time and money as fresh integrations. You cannot begin to imagine the revenue and resources you will end up spending on integrations, if you go with in-house PrestaShop integration development.
Solution to Easily Develop PrestaShop integration
There’s always an easier way to do things. In the case of PrestaShop integration, it is to partner with API2Cart. API2Cart is a unified API that allows to integrate with more than 40 shopping carts at once, including PrestaShop. If your clients have their stores on multiple platforms and you need to integrate with all of them (which is a must), you can just connect with API2Cart, and it will automatically integrate your software with all the platforms at once.
The time, money, and resources you would otherwise be spending on in-house integrations can now be invested in other crucial business functions and decision-making. Moreover, API2Cart also looks after the upgrades and maintenance of the integrations. So, you would not need to repeat the entire integration cycle again. Just choose the right subscription for your needs and take your SaaS business to new levels with API2Cart.
Currently, API2Cart serves more than 3000 active stores and this is definitely not a limit. Its flexible infrastructure enables adding an unlimited number of clients stores, and SSL certificate provides you with secure data interaction. Moreover, it’s always possible to broaden the functionality on your business needs.
What’s more, API2Cart has more than 100 methods to retrieve and manage data on the online stores based on the eCommerce platforms. With these methods, you can manage the entire store data from your eCommerce software. Work with data related to orders, customers, categories, products, and much more with API2Cart’s unified API.
API2Cart API allows to work with the following data from PrestaShop stores:
- orders: order.count / list / info/ add / update/ status.list/ shipment.list / abandoned.list
- products: product.list / count / info / add/ update / attribute.list / child_item.list
- categories: list / count / add / update / delete
- customer data: list / count / find / add / update / delete
- carts: cart.create / validate / list / delete / methods / disconnect
- account: account.cart.list / cart.add / supported_platforms
To know more about how API2Cart can help you with PrestaShop integration, get in touch with us and our customer representative will walk you through the process. You can also ask for a demo of API2Cart for better understanding.