PopShops API Migration guide: Here’s how you can migrate your product data feeds from Rakuten PopShops API to Semantics3

Published in

The Ecommerce Intelligencer

4 min readApr 6, 2018

So, in case you haven’t heard about it yet, Popshops API is shutting down. It’s kind of a big deal, especially since PopShops product data feeds were used by thousands of advertisers and publishers including comparison shopping sites, blogs and loyalty programs.

PopShops was valuable for quite a few reasons:

It is one of the biggest product data feeds portal for affiliate shops with a network of over 25,000 publishers.
Advertisers were able to distribute the most updated product information to publishers which had the direct impact of increasing sales.

So how can you continue getting the freshest product information for your affiliate marketing business?

Short answer: Semantics3's suite of Product APIs

Longer answer:

Semantics3’s suite of APIs, including;

the UPC API, which provides standardized and structured product information from all the top US retailers,
the Price Monitoring API, which provides real-time pricing information, and
the Retailer Feeds API, which delivers a retailer’s entire catalog.

Here’s how you can easily migrate from PopShops API to ours:

Rakuten PopShops API mapped to Semantics3’s API

While Popshops API returns results in both JSON and XML, Semantics3’s API returns results in JSON.

You will, however be able to generate results and convert them into CSV within our dashboard:

Here’s how each type of Popshops’ API query maps to Semantics3’s API:

Here’s a quick overview of our APIs:

Here’s how our data types are structured:

Products/Offers calls

The most comprehensive of Popshop’s API calls, this particular query can be addressed by several of Semantics3’s API endpoints. The table below maps each field to our API endpoints:

Merchants

For a list of available merchants, you can contact us. Semantics3 covers most of the major retailers in the US including Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Sears but our catalog is always expanding.

Merchant types

Semantics3 categorizes not by the type of merchants but by the type of products and we have a in-house categorization tree that is three levels deep and easily searchable.

Deals

You can access list price and offer price (currently mentioned price) for all products via our Price Monitoring API. If the offer price is lower than the list price it means the item is on discount.

Common PopShop API code queries and how they map to Semantics3

Here’s a few examples of how queries from PopShops can easily be mapped to Semantics3

Finding products that matches the keyword “ipod”:

PopShops:http://api.popshops.com/v2/brgymtenmw5ea9unauesmh9nz/products.xml?catalog_key=48qsligejm5qng6cv5waprcoq&keywords=ipodSemantics3:
https://api.semantics3.com/v1/products?q={"search":"ipod"}

Get offers / price comparison for an “ipod”

Popshops:
http://api.popshops.com/v2/brgymtenmw5ea9unauesmh9nz/products.xml?catalog_key=48qsligejm5qng6cv5waprcoq&include_product_groups=1&keywords=xboxSemantics3:
https://api.semantics3.com/v1/products?q={"search":"ipod"}

Get a product feed from a retailer:

Popshops:
http://api.popshops.com/v2/brgymtenmw5ea9unauesmh9nz/products.xml?catalog_key=48qsligejm5qng6cv5waprcoq&merchant_id=1754Semantics3:
https://api.semantics3.com/v1/skus?q={"site":"walmart.com"}