This guide takes you through the basic functionality of Price API. If at any point you have questions, please contact us via our chat system (lower right corner).

Prerequisites

This guide assumes that you have a free account at Price API and that you are currently logged in to it. If you don't have an account yet, start your free trial now.

Let's request some product data!

Make sure you are logged in and navigate to the dashboard.

Scroll down a bit to the section titled "Request many products in bulk". It looks like this:

Step 1: Request products

Do you have a barcode of one of your products at hand? If so, enter it into the first text area (the one hinting "One GTIN per line").

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Barcodes, GTIN, EAN, UPC and JAN

See article Barcodes, GTIN, EAN, UPC and JAN to find out what these are and where to find them for your products.

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Without a barcode

If you don't have a barcode, you can enter a combination of a brand and product name, like Apple iPhone 6S 64GB gold. In this case, please change the dropdown titled key from gtin to keyword.

Now choose a country from the dropdown titled "for country code." These are 2-letter country codes. For example the United States have US, United Kingdom is GB and Germany is DE. Here is a list of countries and their codes.

Next you can select a data source from the dropdown "from source." Depending on the country you have chosen in the last step, the available sources differ.

If your country is not in the list or you are looking for a source that is not in the list, please let us know. We have more sources available and expand on request.

There are more options; just ignore them for now. Next, click the "Request" button to create a data collection job.

You should see a positive, green response like this:

The message contains a job ID, but you don't need to memorize or copy that. Ignore everything else for now. If it's green, that's good enough to continue with the next step. If not, please contact us and we're happy to help you out.

Step 2: Wait until we have collected all the data for you

So what happens now is that our system visits the data source you have selected, kind of like a human would do, searches the product and extracts the relevant information.

This takes a brief moment. A single product would usually take several seconds, sometimes a few minutes. Because our system works highly parallelized, a thousand products will also usually just take a few minutes.

Below the form that you used to request products, there is another headline "Check job progress until its status is finished." That's exactly what we'll do now. The job ID from step 1 was copied for you. Just press the "Check status" button and look at the response:

There is a status field here. It starts being new, works its way over working and finishing all the way to finished.

The job's results can only be downloaded, when the job's status is finished. At that point, we can continue with the next step.

Step 3: Download the product data

Below the last response, you find a third headline titled "Load the job's response." Again, your job's ID has been filled into the text field for you. Now you have a bunch of options, depending on the format you want Price API to provide the product data to you:

• Show JSON: This is a data format popular with programmers. This option will display the data on the dashboard.
• Download JSON, download XML: These are both popular with programmers. This time the data would be downloaded as a file instead of being displayed on the web interface.
• Download CSV (Columns): This and the next option are popular with people using spreadsheets. In the columns variant, there is one row per product. It has a variable amount of columns and every offer (shop name, price, shipping costs, availability etc.) is concatenated to the right.
• Download CSV (Rows): In this format, each offer has its own row. So a product that is offered by ten shops will occupy ten rows. The product information will be redundant and only the offer information is different. This has a fixed number of columns and works well with Pivot Tables.

Then: Profit!

After you have the data, the fun and valuable part begins. Will you build a system that sets perfect prices? Will you identify your competitor's strategy? We'd love to discuss your use case with you. Start a chat or call us anytime.

Summary

That's it. We've covered all the steps you (or a program on your behalf) needs to take to access millions of products on hundreds of data sources, all in the same standardized format:

1. Request products (you can request more than one at once).
2. Wait until the job is finished.
3. Download the data in a format that suits you.