APIs, Web Services, EDI whatever you call them are everywhere.
APIs have been around for decades and have matured into an essential way that systems can communicate to each other spanning all parts of our home and work life.
Impact has been integrating and developing these services for over 20 years, in the early days it was very cliunky and time consuming to build a reliable system but today they are in abundance, well documented and reliable and 99% of all businesses utillise them in some way or another.
Our experience began back in the early days of Merchant Services growing, doing work with Barclays Bank on APACS30 standards for credit card transactions. Today every bit of software we develop usually has a number of integrations to 3rd pary service providers, helping to improve a number of business process and meet the high demands of consumers and businesses wanting 24/7 instant responses to requests.
Below is just an overview of some of our experiences and the benefits it can bring to businesses.
Integration with Amazon Market Place APIs
Multisite ecommerce customers who sell on Amazon in 4 regions need to centralise collation of orders.
Impact integrated with Amazon, allowing orders to be downloaded every 30 mins, formatted and loaded into their order system.
We then validated the orders against stock and pushed the order onto the fulfilment warehouse for picking and distribution.
Once courier tracking infomation was aquired at the distribution center, this was then pushed back through our integration to Amazon to update
Amazon order tracking and email out to the customer the order status. The customer handles many orders a day and the only reliable way to
manage this process was via Amazon integration
Integration with Amazon Web Services APIs - Example S3 Data Storage
A document scanning customer has millions of documents that rarely get accessed via a web portal which Impact also built. There was a big financial cost implication
for keeping these documents on high speed SSD storage arrays. Impact looked at how we could reduce the costs of storage. The key performance
requirement was search time, which for 2.5 Million records was to be under 3s, once the document was identified, retrival time was not such an issue
as long as it was within 10-15s. We chose to integrate with Amazon S3 Web Services (a data storage service) for document storage but keep the database on local SSD storage.
The integration works very well and both performance criteria were met and costs were reduced by 50%.
Integration with EBay APIs
Multisite ecommerce customers who sell on EBay in 4 countries need to centralise collation of orders.
Impact integrated with EBay, allowing orders to be downloaded every 30 mins, formatted and loaded into their order system.
We then validated the orders against stock and pushed the order onto the fulfilment warehouse for picking and distribution.
Once courier tracking infomation was aquired at the distribution center, this was then pushed back through our integration to EBay to update
EBay order tracking and email out to the customer the order status. The customer handles many orders a day and the only reliable way to
manage this process was via EBay integration
Integration with icecat APIs, Market leader in product content syndication
A customer who sells printers and accessories, was struggling to create data sheets for thousands of products that they wished to sell. icecat offers an API
to provide complete datasheets and images for 7.8 Million products. Impact intergrated the system with icecat to provide daily updates on a whole range of products,
the integration provides a seemless reliable service allowing new products and existing product information to be updated without any manual intervention. This saved
the customer hundreds of hours and allowed new products to be available very quickly once released by the manufacturers.
