How to Develop Magento API Integration in a Few Steps?
Any SaaS app provider that works in the eCommerce sphere will tell you right away that Magento is by far one of the most popular platforms people use to buy and sell products. In 2020, Magento accounts for a whopping 12% of all online sellers and is only poised to grow.
As an open-source platform, Magento stays ahead of the competition by offering a high level of customization and flexibility. It provides quick integration with third-party solutions, a vast range of deployment choices, responsive design, a user-friendly interface, and a whole lot of interesting features. They include SEO dedicated modules, product grouping, CMS for static pages, email lists, private sales, and multi-tier pricing.
A growing number of SaaS app providers are willing to do all that it takes to get their solutions integrated with Magento. Magento API integration is one of the best investments you can make in 2020 and beyond. It opens up a whole new list of customers that you can target. All the retailers that have their stores on Magento automatically become your prospects. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of potential customers.
Integrating your system with Magento is by far the best way to gain access to that massive market of prospective customers. However, as you’ll see below, integration is quite difficult and comes with its own set of drawbacks. Keep reading to understand the Magento API better and become aware of the main Magento integration issues. Also, you’ll discover how to develop a connection with Magento API easily.
The Magento API Explained
Magento has a REST API and a SOAP API. Basically, the REST API includes all the functions developers can perform to perform requests and receive responses. These interactions are executed using the HTTP protocol. With the REST API, you can easily manage products, customers, inventory, using the four main supported methods: GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE.
The SOAP API is another type of Magento API. Most developers consider it to be harder to use than the REST API. The SOAP API uses more complex methods to get data. Mainly, it allows retailers to manage their eCommerce stores and work with customers, categories, products, and orders.
If you provide SaaS solutions for retailers and want to get access to the data from Magento stores, you need to develop a connection with its REST API. Magento API integration allows your marketing automation, shipping, order, inventory, dropshipping management software to manage all the information needed for providing your system’s functionality.
Top Magento API Integration Difficulties
Over time, many SaaS business owners have asked their developers why Magento API integration was such a hell. Truth be told, the Magento anatomy is extremely complex and includes countless of “traps” and “pitfalls”. They work with an EAV database model (entity-attribution-value) and makes use of over 40 tables of information regarding categories and products. Also, developers face with SQL query complexity. The entire process of Magento API integration takes weeks or even months to complete.
Let’s explore some of the most common Magento integration difficulties:
- Challenges with returning array formats: certain objects should be returned as an array value. However, if the system detects that there is only one item, it will return it as a single item instead. To solve this, you have to add an extra function that checks if an item is in array format or transform it into the one.
- Issues when sending information to Magento: many developers had to fix a bug in Magento’s API that would appear when they needed to send hash objects. If the key contained at least one underscore inside the name, it would not work unless you would include that underscore in quotation marks.
- Low accuracy of the API documentation: another challenge developers are facing relates to the accuracy of the documentation. Basically, when creating a product using the API, you need to name the exact websites that will be used.
- The default values are not stored in the system.xlm database.
In a nutshell, the API integration difficulties are many and quite complex. They usually come as security risks, technological complexity, high expensiveness, high time consumption, further upgrading & maintenance.
How to develop the Integration with Magento easily?
No doubt setting up an API integration with Magento is a tedious process that takes a lot of time and previous investigations. You need to have experienced developers in your company who know what they are doing and can overcome any integration obstacle. Even if you manage to integrate your SaaS business with Magento, it still takes a lot of effort to maintain this connection and solve any bugs that might come along the way.
The best thing you can do to avoid those integration complexities, time lost, and huge costs is to work with a professional team who is an expert in Magento integration. More specifically, you can choose API2Cart service, which can connect your SaaS system with Magento with no difficulties.
What’s even best is that API2Cart allows you to integrate your solution not only with Magento but also with 40+ other eCommerce platforms and marketplaces. All you need to do is to integrate your software with API2Cart once and never be worried about developing separate connections with shopping platforms. Also, you won’t need to take care of integration support and updates. Thus, you can save a huge deal of time and gain the peace of mind that your shopping platforms’ connections are working as expected.
API2Cart provides a 30-day free trial that allows you to test its functionality and see if it fits your goals. More information you can find here: https://api2cart.com/.
