Credit Offers WordPress Plugin
An Open Source, Point & Click Configuration Solution
The Credit Offers API allows our affiliate partners to retrieve product listings and details, check for pre-qualification, and pre-fill customer data to a credit card application. It provides a diverse set of benefits to our affiliates and their customers — product listings ensure Capital One credit card products show up with the most up to date accurate information on our affiliates sites, pre-qualifications give customers a better sense of whether they’re likely to be approved for and pre-fill streamlines the application process that follows.
A popular Capital One API product, Credit Offers API is being used by affiliate partners such as Credit Sesame, CreditCards.com, NerdWallet, and others. While most affiliates use Credit Offers in a comparison shopping capacity, it came up during a routine optimization audit that some were interested in leveraging our capabilities via CMS platforms such as WordPress. While the original Credit Offers API works with WordPress, it’s not fully optimized for that platform. Un-optimized APIs can pose security and performance problems for our affiliates and their users. Partnering with our affiliates on optimizations is a win-win-win for everyone involved and a core goal of Capital One’s Professional Services team.
Our team does a lot of work post-integration to optimize partnerships. This often involves monitoring integrations, exploring affiliate tech stacks, and building sample code to help optimize their API usage. In this instance, we dug into how affiliates were using WordPress and designed the Credit Offers WordPress Plugin — a point and click configuration for our Credit Offers API.
The plugin works in the same manner as any other WordPress plugin. By uploading and installing it, an affiliate can connect to the Credit Offers API in a point and click fashion. The plugin handles the connection to the API and provides simple PHP methods to access the API responses natively. It will also encrypt the client credentials and add a lightweight caching layer for faster rendering. The plugin can lower the barrier of integration from weeks to minutes.
You may notice that the plugin is hosted on GitHub and has an Apache License, Version 2.0. WordPress implementations tend to be highly complex and very specific to a particular use case. Since the average affiliate would be using this Plugin as a ‘starting off point’ for code specific to their integration, it made sense to package and distribute this as an open source project. We hope this will allow future affiliates to optimize the plugin for their particular tech stack and integration needs. Some may be able to use it out of the box, others won’t. Open sourcing this plugin allows for the most flexibility in how, and whom, can use it.
We view our affiliate program as a partnership. We want to give our affiliate partners the best experience possible when consuming our digital products. Providing white-glove services via our Professional Services team is a part of that. That’s why we help build better integrations and consult on optimizations and solutions architecture. If you’re a new affiliate using WordPress, we hope this plugin will make your integration faster, easier, and more secure with out-of-the-box caching and security features. This means an improved time to market for consuming the Credit Offers API.
To learn more about the Credit Offers API, check out our site.
To learn more about the Credit Offers WordPress Plugin, check out our GitHub.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT: These opinions are those of the author. Unless noted otherwise in this post, Capital One is not affiliated with, nor is it endorsed by, any of the companies mentioned. All trademarks and other intellectual property used or displayed are the ownership of their respective owners. This article is © 2018 Capital One.
