I am new to the affiliate area. After doing research, I found that CP does offer developer APIs, but I did not find them up-to-date and always working.

How are affiliates showing large amounts of CP products? I want people to see a ton of examples on my site and each image/link will go to CP with the correct affiliate info.

I don't want to just forward them to CP. And I don't just want to have a one image link to CP.

Anyone doing this?

Yes, there are. But if you don't have an api key, you won't be able to do much at all and I don't believe they are releasing any at this time. You can contact affiliates@cafepress.com to discuss the api and affiliating with them. And the api is beta at best, and does not currently appear to have any further development. So understand that if you're going to develop something for it.

As to "how"? That's a business secret I spent countless hours working on.

You need a CafePress Account to get access to an API key.

The key is located here:
http://www.cafepress.com/cp/members/xml_feed.aspx
(you'll need to be logged in)

The API is a REST API, we're up to version 3. Go here to start playing: http://api.cafepress.com

If I'm not mistaken, new accounts do not get that page. I've had that issue with newer shopkeepers for Cafewish. I created a new account with a new email, and that page didn't give me an api key. I've had to use my own api key and those donated by others basically to access the shop feed.

Thanks for the info. I have had my account for a while, just never did much with it. Now I have the need for affiliate revenue because some domains are picking up. I was able to generate an API key.

It is frustrating that CP does not update this stuff. For those of us who know programming and internet really well, it could make a huge difference in how accurate our sites are and how much we sell. I really think it in their best interest to finish and maintain those APIs. But what do I know, I am just a consumer.

I guess I should say thanks to CP for the APIs they currently have.

I will try them out and see what happens.

Thanks for the help.

quote:

It is frustrating that CP does not update this stuff. For those of us who know programming and internet really well, it could make a huge difference in how accurate our sites are and how much we sell. I really think it in their best interest to finish and maintain those APIs. But what do I know, I am just a consumer.

Yeah, we can only hope that once they finish focusing on their current stuff, they turn their attention to the API -or better yet, bring in a few of us to develop it.

Glad you got your key. Go have fun!

Another question...

I am able to use the StoreLookup API (http://api.cafepress.com/index.asmx), but for larger stores, it times out and sometimes even errors out on the CP side. Is there a way to tell it a start number and total products to return so I can page through the products?

Is there a better API for looking up products by store?

Thanks,

The smallest grouping you can get from the store lookup is by productTypeNumber.

http://api.cafepress.com/index.asmx/StoreLookup?apiKey=...toreId=(yourstoreid)

cycle through each of the productTypeNumbers found at

http://api.cafepress.com/merchandise.list.cp

except for #8 which is "Fulfillment"

I found the merchandise list is not correct. There are a few products here and there missing.

I will look into adding productTypeNumber.

Thanks.

Yeah, it lists some retired products as well.

I "think" this list has the obsolete ones removed...(link is my domain. I pull from the merch api and remove some stuff automatically)

http://www.findmytee.com/getproductlist.php

It looks like you keep a pretty good list. How do you know which ones are obsolete?

I was looking more at the advancedSearch API (). Is there a way to specify a storeId in the query? I have tried and it does not seem to work. Sending this api a storeid would solve my issue because of the startResults and MaxResults.

Wouldn't it be loverly? But no. You can't combine the two, which would be great.

I'd love to see a unified product search that can be filtered by keyword/producttype/storeid/section/price with the startResults and maxResults.

To be honest, I took a quick glance there and I can't see any I recognize as retired products.

I will play with it for a while and see what I can come up with. Thanks for all your help.

quote:

Originally posted by mewantmore:
I am new to the affiliate area. After doing research, I found that CP does offer developer APIs, but I did not find them up-to-date and always working.

How are affiliates showing large amounts of CP products? I want people to see a ton of examples on my site and each image/link will go to CP with the correct affiliate info.

I don't want to just forward them to CP. And I don't just want to have a one image link to CP.

Anyone doing this?

Aside from writing you own you do know that there are a number of developed affiliate scripts already made as well right?

eg. CPshops, 4thclick, popshops