Everything You Need to Know About a Deals API

Introduction

Much like every living organism has a way to communicate with others, software and apps also exchange meaningful information.

Applications can “talk” to each other through a medium – an intermediary channel – called API. API is an acronym for Application Programming Interface. This is an environment designed to carry the components needed by two pieces of code, software, or apps to communicate with each other.

As an analogy, think of Netflix. By entering commands and telling it what to play, you are using an API to communicate with it.

In much the same way, coupon APIs are designed to allow your enterprise applications and software to communicate with the coupon feed you are subscribed to.

This enables the enterprise software to pull data from the feed, process it into meaningful marketing material, generate coupons and customize them, and so much more.

Many affiliate marketers today are utilizing coupon APIs to improve their workflows and make marketing processes more efficient and impactful.

In today’s highly competitive world, it is absolutely essential for businesses to reduce times to market without compromising on the quality of the output. Deals API can help your affiliate marketing channels leverage the speed and convenience to stay ahead in competition.

What is Coupon API?

Coupon API is an environment that allows you to pull coupon data from any and all of your affiliate networks. Deals API is a dedicated mechanism for coupons that provides an interface for two software or applications to communicate with each other and share coupon information.

By gaining this functionality, your affiliate program can generate coupons, distribute them, automate coupon processes, personalize or customize coupons according to the marketing cohort, and a lot more.

Today, it has become essential for affiliate marketers to have a coupon API in place to expedite and streamline the processes pertaining to coupon-based marketing.

Who Needs Deals API?

A coupon API is actually meant for marketers who have a detailed coupon strategy mobilized. If you are a marketing affiliate for a brand, your campaigns will do well with a robust promo code API in place.

There are two classes of professionals who leverage coupon APIs for marketing:

• Affiliate marketers
• Developers

Developers who are directly engaged with brands for their marketing strategies leverage coupon APIs to speed up the marketing process.

Affiliate marketers make use of coupon APIs to inform their marketing strategies. Some coupon feed platforms like LinkMyDeals also provide dedicated dashboards in a deals API to enhance the user experience and make it simple to execute a coupon marketing task.

What to Expect in a Coupon API?

If you partner with LinkMyDeals as a coupon API and feed associate, your affiliate marketing business will receive a highly detailed, customized coupon feed.

You can get access to the latest deals and offers with as little input as a URL and a few parameters for the coupon feed customization.

With LinkMyDeals, you can expect the following parameters in the coupon API:

• Endpoint URL – The API initiation
• Information request to generate feed response – You need to provide the API key. This key is used to call the API. You would then be prompted to select the format in which you wish to receive the output. Once that is done, you would need to specify whether you want to refresh the entire feed or only the incremental changes. The API would then request the timestamp information. You can request this information to be off the record to keep the schedules undisturbed.
• The response you receive will contain the following information:
  • The unique ID of the offers
  • Status of the offers
  • Title of the deals and offers
  • Description, including terms and conditions, what the offer is for, etc.
  • Type of the offer – whether it is a coupon or a deal
  • Coupon code (this field will remain empty in case the type is a deal)
  • The store where the offer is from
  • The affiliate network where the offer is pulled from
  • The categories the offer belongs to. Each category is separate by a comma
  • Whether you are the exclusive publisher of the coupon
  • Start date of the coupon
  • End/expiry date of the coupon

How to Implement Coupon API?

Implementing a coupon API with LinkMyDeals is fairly simple. There are two ways to do it:

• Implement the processing of incremental feeds only
• Implement the processing of the entire coupon feed

Let’s understand both in detail.

Incremental Feeds

If you only wish to receive updates since the last refresh, follow the steps below and create a script:

1. You need to create a temporary table to stage your incremental feed.
2. In the LinkMyDeals coupons, check each ID for its status. If the status is “New,” it means that this is a new coupon. You can add it to your table. If the status is “Updated,” it means an existing coupon has new information – you can add this one to the table too. If the status is “Suspended,” you can go ahead and delete the coupon.

Full Feeds

In case you wish to receive the entire list of coupons that are currently active, you should follow the steps detailed below:

1. Create a temporary table in the database to upload the feed.
2. For every coupon you see from the pulled feed, perform the following actions:
   1. Add the coupons as “New” if you don’t already have them in your database
   2. For existing coupons, update the details with the latest ones in the table
3. After updating all the coupons from the latest feed, you can delete the older ones.

Why Does Your Business Need Coupon API?

Marketing using coupons isn’t just handing out mindless offers and deals. Devising a coupon marketing strategy is as essential today as planning a full-fledged marketing campaign. A coupon strategy that is well-planned has the potential to earn countless benefits for a business.

However, the strategy implementation part sometimes runs into a wall – and this is where coupon APIs come in. There are several reasons that, as an affiliate marketer, you need to implement a deals API sooner than later:

• There are countless affiliate marketers today on the internet, vying for commissions by speeding up their coupon update process
• You need your coupon generation and distribution to be as quick as possible to reach the audience before your competitors get a chance
• The coupon system you deploy needs to collect, collate, and process data from a multitude of touchpoints. This will help you deliver customized, personalized coupons to cohorts
• For effective coupon marketing strategies, you need all your data to be centralized and accessible

A robust coupon API can help you with all of the above pain points.

• A good deals API lets you automate the processes around your coupon system, helping you reduce the overall time to market.
• Coupon APIs help you quickly integrate with your ERPs, aiding with coupon generation , distribution and usage tracking. It keeps you competitively engaged in the market.
• A promo code API can integrate with your CRM and help you customize every coupon according to the person you are marketing it to. It helps you close more deals and improve your commissions.
• You can stitch together a seamless customer journey using a coupon API environment to improve the transportability of codes from one channel to another.

Essentially, you need a coupon API because it helps you save time, resources, cost and developmental efforts needed to place a good marketing strategy in order.