Receive sales prices in currency of choice

[Kyle McLaren]

Hi guys,

I'm wondering if there is a way/future updates whereby I can receive:

"sale_price"

"msrp_price"

in ZAR and not USD?

I want to avoid implementing a currency conversion API of my own and reflect accurate prices from the currency converter that Gilt uses.

Thanks in advance guys.

Kyle

[Federico Feroldi]

Hello Kyle,

we're in the process of updating our backend systems to be fully aware of locales and currencies but that's going to take some time still, so I believe it could take months before that feature is mature enough to be exposed on our public API.

However since eventually this is going to happen, I'll be happy to get your thoughts and use cases examples! We definitely want this kind of feature to be designed to solve real-world use cases.

The biggest issue I can see right now is to set a reliable and objective conversion rate. We usually have prices in USD so we would need to convert the price to any currency at the API request time. In that case we must either chose our own conversion rate (i.e. based on some reference like Yahoo! Finance) OR accept a custom conversion rate from the client (i.e. a USD_TO_ZAR parameter). In the latter case I don't see much value added by the API since the conversion can be done by the client.

What do you think?

best,

-federico  

[Kyle McLaren]

Hi Federico,

Certainly looking forward to working with the API over the coming months!

Well, our particular use case is not very complex, since we will only be marketing to users in one country (for now). We will therefore only require one simple conversion from the USD value received in the JSON data to the current equivalent value in ZAR.

In terms of the actual API, perhaps a request for a particular currency could be appended to the URL via a parameter like:

"&curr=ZAR"

The conversion is done on your side and returned as standard "sale_price/msrp_price" in the JSON data?

I definitely think it would have to reliable, accurate and up to date therefore would be best to use Yahoo! or Google.

In my experience, Yahoo! Finance does not seem to update as regularly as Google Calculator...

You could also look into something like https://openexchangerates.org/ which looks very reliable and scalable.

In the meantime, I doubt it will be a huge challenge to implement client side, I was trying to avoid it though as I had a feeling you might have something in the works...

A Google currency conversion URL:

http://www.google.com/ig/calculator?hl=en&q=1USD=?ZAR

and returns this:

{lhs: "1 U.S. dollar",rhs: "10.20252 South African rands",error: "",icc: true}

However I've discovered http://rate-exchange.appspot.com/ where someone has implemented a very nice API that takes the Google data and returns nice, clean JSON:

{"to": "ZAR", "rate": 10.20252, "from": "USD", "v": 10.20252}

You would then implement some code and GET the whole thing running.

[Federico Feroldi]

Hi Kyle,

that looks great! I'll keep you posted with our progress! Stay tuned and let me know if I can help in any other way,

best, 

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Federico Feroldi

Gilt Groupe, Inc.

[Kyle McLaren]

Thanks Federico, will do.

Looks like there may be some restrictions from the Google API due to the same origin policy but I will keep hacking away until I get it...