The Internet Marketplace Format (IMF) is an open integration protocol, which we have prepared in the IdoSell for integration with marketplace external sites and which is suitable for independent programming by the marketplace, which wants to integrate itself with IdoSell stores.

Marketplace API

API Marketplace allows to place orders in the store, handing over to the store information about payment of the order, downloading basic information about the store, downloading information on delivery profiles and available collection points, and allows to inquire about the availability of products or order status.

API Marketplace is a separated API from API of the IdoSell administration panel, through which marketplace can communicate with the store in the area of orders from a given marketplace .

Separation of API Marketplace also means that by creating integration you do not have to give access to API panel, which allows access to sensitive data and at the same time does not allow operations related to receiving orders from marketplaces.

Placing cross-docking and dropshipping orders

Marketplaces have a different form of cooperation and order handling. Some are a kind of market where a lot of entities sell similar products, while others do not openly disclose to the supplier of products, thus treating the cooperating entity as a wholesale store.

Thinking about the latter in API Marketplace, we have prepared a set of methods responsible for placing orders in the cross-docking and dropshipping model, which work identically to using Customer API in the protocol ICDF.

Store offer in the form of a product feed for the marketplace

Data about the current offer of the store, i.e. price, descriptions and information on the products availability, marketplace can receive using a ready feed in the standard IOF, or modified in any data structure.

For IMF, the format IOF in version 3.0 is supported, in which apart from the full base of items you can also receive information about changes in the offer in an incremental manner. In the latter case, this means that there is no need to query each time for the full range of the store's products, as full information is returned only about those products in which any given has changed.

Exemplary sample of the offer:

Custom product feed structure

If the marketplace requires a specific structure and data about products in the feed, you can customize its layout and content by uploading a driver that maps any data to the appropriate attribute for the output file.
The procedure of how to do this has already been described on the occasion of price comparison engines, whose configuration is similar to the marketplaces module.