Hello Retail API

For regularly updated information on the current state of the Hello Retail API, as well as a complete list of the methods available in the SDK, we refer to this source: developer.helloretail.com/sdk/

This guide is not an exhaustive reference to these features, but rather is supposed to provide some inspiration for typical uses of our API. This way it might become apparent, if you would benefit from throwing development ressources after setting this up yourself, or if you would prefer the approach, where Hello Retail is managing the majority of the solution on your behalf.

Pros and cons

Very broadly speaking, the tradeoff between a managed solution and an API-based setup, is a choice between ease of use on one hand, and how smoothly the individual features, like Search and recommendations can be integrated in your webshop on the other. With the managed solution, Hello Retail handles the layout and insertion of elements on your webshop, but is limited to the fact that things are invoked through JavaScript, with a liquid template rending the html. For the script-part, this means that there is some expected, minor, delay between when the page has finished loading and when the elements can be inserted. In addition, the managed solution requires, that the Implementation Team and Tech Support at Hello Retail are able to replicate and maintain functions like add to basket, compare products, put on personal wishlist and similar, that you may have added to your webshop, in a manner that can be executed inside the liquid templates, which form the basis of most of Hello Retails frontend rendering.
Put differently, if your webshop is having complex functionality running, and you are not able to provide an easy frontend implementation that can be copied by Hello Retail, you might only be able to retain this functionality in the features provided by Hello Retail, if your developers use our API to return products, and then handle the returned data, is if it was products on your own webshop/frontend.

If you have any questions about this guide, then please contact Support or your designated Account Manager about this.