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APIs & Hack Ideas

Braintree

Check 'n Go

  • "Flynancer" - book flights, hotels, rental cars through the app. Financing available through "Flynancer".

  • SkyMall feature: member only discounts

  • API's: Mashery - Expedia/Hotels.com, Dwolla for payment processing, SendGrid for transactional emails, ConstantContact for marketing communication, Twillo for phone and SMS transactional/marketing messaging , Order.in for ordering service while in hotels & restaurants.

  • Check out this document for additional ideas: http://ge.tt/2jGCqGL/v/0?c

Constant Contact

Integrate your eCommerce app with the best-of-breed email marketing tool used by half a million small businesses. Use the Constant Contact open APIs to capture buyers' contact info and turn them into repeat customers. Check us out on github.

Dwolla

  • You + Dwolla: Build a 16 digit card gateway as a proxy. Authorize a Dwolla account and then issue a 16 digit account number / expiration date that bills against the user's Dwolla account. Build an API for ANY gateway to tap in.

  • Use Stripe to make deposits into Dwolla. Charge a card and send funds to a Dwolla account.

  • Develop the merchant application where whenever a payment goes to a merchant, it sends a designated amount to charity / puts it in savings / sends cash back to the consumer who just bought something.

  • Go here for more hack ideas: http://ge.tt/65YVgGL/v/0?c

  • Checkout our developer's portal at http://developers.dwolla.com

Etsy

  • We definitely encourage hackers to not only think about the Etsy buyer experience but to also consider the experience of our 800,000+ active sellers who are growing their creative, independent businesses from the ground up. One example might be an app that makes it easy for Etsy sellers to create and send thank you notes (with a holiday coupon offer!) to buyers via Sincerely.

  • Did you know the first item ever pinned on Pinterest was from Etsy? Did you know Etsy is the most popular source for Pins on the internets? Social curation is gaining steam and Etsy's right in the middle of it. How can you make discovering Etsy products more interesting and easy using the social curation that's already happening on Etsy and across the web?

  • If you owned a small business, wouldn't you want to know where your customers were coming from? CRM tools are hugely popular among Etsy sellers. Use the Etsy API to build maps that let sellers know where their best customers are from.

  • For a full list of third party apps built on the Etsy API, check out our App Gallery! http://www.etsy.com/apps

Flashfoto

  • A hack that automatically removes the chaotic background to all product images for e-merchants

  • Generate an application that enhances style boards

  • Create custom thank you notes for customers using their photos

  • Past hacks created using our API included, augmented reality popup book, photobomb your friends pictures, print perfect images on demand and more!

  • Our API documentation can be found at www.flashfotoapi.com

Foursquare

Gumroad

  • Create a store that showcases items being sold via Gumroad

  • A hack that allows any file in Finder or a folder to be sold on Gumroad with one-click

  • Require a one-time fee to sign up for a web app.

  • Sell in-game credits and currency.

  • Generate QR codes that act as unique tickets for an event.

  • Custom thank-you notes for donations.

  • Here's our API info: http://gumroad.com/api

Iron.io

  • Use IronWorker to process transactions or send emails in the background. Or fire up lots of workers to crawl sites and compare prices or process a ton of images to provide the right look for your app.

  • Use IronWorker's scheduling capability to kick off jobs every 5 minutes, on the hour, or just about on any schedule you want. Pair it with SendGrid or Twilio to send out personalized emails, SMS, reports, and other notifications.

  • Use IronMQ to break up the workload and get a lot of things done asynchronously.

  • Use IronCache to store temporary data and coordinate across a bunch of stateless processes.

  • See our Dev Center and Examples repo for more information.

Kiip

SendGrid

  • Using SendGrid's event API, you could monitor for when a user opens up a coupon that has already expired and automatically send them a new one.

  • If you're a heavy online shopper, it can be hard to manage all the receipts that accumulate in your inbox during a month.

  • Using SendGrid's parse API, you could aggregate all of a user's purchases during a month and send them a summary. This could be something like a Trip.it for receipts.

  • Using SendGrid's parse API, analyze a user's purchases and send them email recommendations of other things that they could buy.

  • Monitor popular e-commerce websites for price changes on items that a user wants to buy and send them email alerts when they reach a certain threshold.

  • Create an e-commerce platform that uses Dwolla for payments and sends out receipts using SendGrid.

  • When a user wants to buy something, but not right away. Price-fix it for them and send reminders using SendGrid. (Slow daily deals)

Shopify

Shopify is a hosted eCommerce platform powering over 30,000 online stores for the likes of Penny Arcade, Epic Meal Time, Stack Exchange, and Wikipedia. Shopify Apps are web applications that talk to Shopify over our RESTful API that end up making our merchants happy in one way or another. You can write them in any language but we have great adapters for Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET.

The Shopify API lets your app do almost anything a merchant can with their own store including run sales; gather + analyze customer, sales data; add front-end functionality for customers to use; and post articles or full pages of content.

We've also got Webhooks that allow you to be notified in real time whenever something happens on a shop. Here are some useful links to get you on your way: Get started by signing up for our Partners program: partners.shopify.com; Familiarize yourself with the API: api.shopify.com; Read up on our App Fund and wishlist if you're short on ideas: fund.shopify.com; Check out the Shopify App Store for more inspiration: apps.shopify.com

Sincerely

  • Pull images from Flickr or 500px.com and send them as postcards

  • Integrate with Cheezeburger API and send postcards from those images

  • Integrate with Instagram API and send postcards from popular images

  • Check into Foursquare and load up images around the area and send those images as postcards

  • Send your Facebook photos as postcards

  • Identify Facebook photos that are tagged with you and someone else and have the ability to send that photo as a postcard to the other person in the photo

  • Here's our API docs: sites.google.com/a/sincerely.com/shiplib

Stripe

  • Show payments coming in to your website on a real time map using Stripe's API and webhooks.

  • An invoicing app using Stripe Apps (https://stripe.com/platform)

  • A statistics dashboard for your payments using Stripe Apps

Storenvy

  • Omni-Seller: Storenvy + Etsy = Let merchants publish products, manage inventory, and track orders across multiple platforms.

  • Notifenvy: Twilio + Storenvy = Use Storenvy's notification webhooks to send emails, SMS, and phone call notifications to merchants when all kinds of events occur. Examples: A large sale occurs. Only 1 in stock of an item. An item sells out. Biggest sales day in the last 30 days. Biggest traffic day, etc.

  • Instant Instagram Store: Instagram + Storenvy + Sincerely (or Moo.com) = Automatically create a web-based store from a user's favorite Instagram photos and print and ship them on-demand when an order is placed.

  • Minienvy: Wordpress/Tumblr + Storenvy = Let store owners embed mini-stores in the sidebars of their blogs. Use Storenvy for checkout.

  • Mapenvy: Google Maps + Storenvy = Visualize where your orders come from and get a better sense of where your following is.

  • Snapenvy: A mobile phone + Storenvy = Take a picture of something with your phone and instantly zap it into your Storenvy store.

  • Link to API docs: developers.storenvy.com

Temboo

  • A browser extension that automatically compares prices (Amazon)

  • A hack that calculates and displays how much a company is spending on lobbying and in campaign donations while users shop (Influence Explorer)

  • Automatically calculate a donation to charity based on a small percentage of user's past online purchases (Paypal/Dwolla)

Terapeak

Every second there are $2000 worth of goods sold on eBay. There is a wealth of information about products, sellers and pricing to be gleaned from this marketplace. Sellers (not just limited to eBay) are looking for tools and apps to help them make their business more profitable:

  • Pricing based on what price point people are actually buying, not just based on what sellers are offering

  • Products rising in popularity that other competitors have not yet discovered

  • Uncovering opportunities across marketplace platforms, such as eBay's international sites, Amazon and Etsy

  • "7 Habits of Highly Effective Sellers", profiling model sellers in different categories to identify what makes great online sellers great - an ode to Stephen Covey

  • Notification mash-ups with services like Twilio to send out alerts of marketplace activity

Tip or Skip

  • Create a socially curated store by linking social data from Tip or Skip with Etsy and other merchants

  • Create a new game "which should i buy?" that asks a friend to tip one out of a set of similar products

  • Pull in images from retailers on Foursquare (or Google retailer) to show to people to potential tip based on their current location

  • Create a plug-in for sites that shows their top X tips -- e.g., shows amazon most tipped items

  • Create a plug-in which recognizes when you are at a retailer and asks you to tip something

  • Our API page: tips.by/developers

TokBox

  • Sales support application: enable brand reps to provide advice to customers while shopping online

  • Video product reviews

  • Virtual tupperware party app: Enable brand representatives to sell products to a group

  • Interactive QVC: Live product demonstrations with audience Q&A

  • Social shopping: Enable customers to shop face-to-face online with friends

Twilio

  • SMS Payments & Receipts: Provide users with a faster and more convenient way to get receipts and pay for items.

  • Ask a friend (SMS from the browser): Use live chat or SMS to get advice on a product you're shopping for by sending and receiving messages from the browser. Example: http://goo.gl/g9gQK

  • SMS Notifications for price drops, one-time offers, etc.: Use SMS to send deal alerts and one-time offers to customers.

  • Mobile pin number for secure mobile purchases: Protect users and secure your apps with mobile two-factor authentification.

WePay

  • Our api can be found at www.wepay.com/developer

  • Please come visit our booth for unique e-commerce and marketplace ideas

X.commerce

X.commerce is building the industry's most complete portfolio of commerce capabilities, created to enable developers redefine and build great shopping experiences for the future. To give you an idea, here is a quick list of commerce offerings that you can use to build the next great eCommerce apps:

Commerce (both online and offline) consists of various phases that a consumer goes through. We have put together a Commerce Wheel and a small illustration to help you visualize them. Hope this gives you some ideas on what you want to build.

As featured in:

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