NearSt Integration Overview
Table of Contents
About NearSt
NearSt is a retail technology company getting people back into high street shops. They're connecting every product in every shop worldwide to the web, making it as easy to find something you want nearby as it is today to find it online.
Their technology, NearLive, connects to Merchanter and turns raw stock into quality live inventory that today is already trusted by the likes of Google and others to power local product search.
Integration
The NearSt FTP Gateway and HTTP API allows Merchanter to upload basic stock availability information for your depots/shops, which NearSt processes into rich product profiles accessed by Google, Facebook and other platform partners.
The basic integration works by uploading three bits of information about every product available in the shop in a CSV file to NearSt every 15 minutes: barcode, quantity, price.
The price is the retail price inclusive of VAT and quantity is the free stock quantity at the branch.
The upload can happen via FTP or via HTTP, identifying the shop with a unique upload key. The upload key (or FTP password) is supplied to the retailer upon sign-up to NearSt. Merchanter uses the HTTP method to upload the stock CSV file. This is in 2 steps :-
- Merchanter makes a request to NearSt for an “upload URL” using the upload key for the shop (branch/depot)
- Merchanter calls the HTTP PUT method using the “upload URL” to upload the CSV file's binary content.
Eligible Products
Only products which have
- A standardised barcode (EAN-8, UPC-A or EAN-13)
- A non-zero price
- Products must also be stocked in units (e.g. unit(s), sheet(s), piece(s)).