Offering Web Services to Dealers for Content Delivery

HTML & CSS
1

Hi Sitepoint!

I am not sure if this is the right forum to post this, but one of the options could(or rather will be one of them)be XML feeds etc. What has been requested of me is to come up with a good way to offer web based product listings to our dealers that sell our products for use in their website. This would include low level users that build their own simple sites, up to dealers that have their own consulting group to work on them.

Now I have dealt with the other end of this in the past with affiliate marketing sites which included three options that I can remember; iframes, javascript links, and XML feeds on a nightly basis. I was thinking of going along those same lines but thought that I would shoot this out to you guys to get some feedback on what the community thinks.

Currently we use strictly iframes for this type of thing now, but it was designed by my predecessor and uses our live product page and passes query string params to alter layout, options, etc. It seems a little messy to me and there has to be a better way or at least altered and expanded.

What do you guys think?

2

I think it makes sense to offer a few options to your customers. One would be the iFrame / Javascript approach for folks who are just capable of “copy this special code into your website”. The other would be some sort of data service for folks with the chops and desire to deal with data.

3

Thanks wwb_99 for the input! So the Iframe/javascript approach should be fairly easy to implement - relatively speaking, for nothing worth doing is ever easy:). For the XML, do you guys think a nightly ftp feed subscription would be a good approach or some type of RESTful/SOAP API? I have read some on Web Service API implementations but still have a way to go in that area.

Thanks again!