Can I hook up an API we're writing to my shopify store when loading new products?

[plantbaby]

Hello team - We are plantbaby, kinda like Etsy but for plants only.  So, you can imagine that, at some point, we'll have thousands of plant growers adding new plants for sale on the shopify store.  So, we're trying to make that process simpler for the vendor than it is now.  

Current state:

When adding new plant products to sell, the user has to enter in product descriptions manually with the following data (for example):  plant name, light and watering instructions, whether poisonous to pets or not. Imagine thousands of plant vendors entering in this product description in no formulaic way (which is what is happening now). They forget what we're asking them to add.  As a result, we lose customers because google doesn't find the info that customers are keyword searching on.  

Ideal state: 

We're working on an API to go "automatically collect" the described data for the vendor automatically.  For example, both iOS and google lens provides the plant name (pretty reliably actually).  So, could we collect that data from the picture taken (when the user is snapping photos from within the shopify app) and prefill it in the product name section in shopify?  Another example, there are reliable databases on the web where we can pull light / watering instructions (and whether poisonous to pets) via API. We want to automatically insert that data for the vendor in shopify as they are loading the new product (or at some other time?).  These improvements will create better and more systematic product descriptions for google to crawl for interested customers and we'll gain so many more customers rendering more revenues for shopify.

Please help if you can!!  What can we do?  I'd love to be able to keep using shopify if we can figure this out.   

[jazz-jay]

Hi,

The ideal workflow would be for the user to enter the plant's name and then based on the plant name, api requests will be made to collect the plant's data and prefill it in the product description.

There are various technical aspects in this project. If you want to discuss into more details.

Feel free to pm me.

Thanks.

[plantbaby]

Makes sense, however, we want the plant name to be prefilled from the google lens / iOS data associated with the picture.  Is it possible for shopify to access that data on a picture that is EITHER taken within the shopify "add product" interface or when it is uploaded from a device?  If yes, do we need to write an API for that or can shopify be amended to access this data.  Other users would definitely benefit from being able to use data associated with pictures in shopify.  

[EcomGraduates]

Hello there  

Yes, you can hook up an API that you are writing to your Shopify store when loading new products. Here are the steps you can follow:

1. First, you will need to create a new custom app in your Shopify store's admin panel. To do this, go to "Apps" in the left-hand menu, and then click on the "Create app" button.
2. Follow the prompts to create a new custom app and obtain an API key and API password. These will be used to authenticate your API calls to the Shopify API.
3. In your API code, you can use the Shopify API client library for the programming language you are using to make API calls to your store. For example, if you are using Node.js, you can use the shopify-api-node library.
4. To create a new product using the API, you can use the POST /admin/api/2020-04/products.json endpoint. This endpoint allows you to create a new product by sending a POST request with a JSON payload containing the product details.
5. In your API code, you can use the API client library to make the POST request and pass in the necessary authentication credentials (API key and password) and the product details payload. The API will then create a new product in your store based on the information you provided.

I hope this helps!