Harry Potter and AliExpress API Integration. How we tried to outwit the chat center (and outwitted!)

Houston, in touch Anton Batashov, head of integration and technical support at XWAY. You will laugh, but we have a problem! The chat center, implemented in the interface of the AliExpress personal account, is intended for an individual entrepreneur with Chinese patience, and from our requests and temperament, it makes him sad and falls into thoughtfulness.

Hello everyone, now a little more serious. Most of the modern marketplaces were initially built according to the FbM (Fulfillment by Marketplace) scheme, in which goods are stored in the warehouse of the site, and communication with customers goes through the chat center of the marketplace. This is how OZON, SberMegaMarket, Yandex.Market and Wildberries operate, which have their own sales and customer support departments. If the seller needs their own chat with customers, they can use integration via the marketplace API.

With AliExpress, everything is a little exactly the opposite – its basic FbS (Fulfillment by Seller) scheme, in which the goods are stored, shipped and delivered by the seller, implies that communication with buyers is also carried out directly. To do this, there is a separate chat center right in your AliExpress personal account. But it is designed for a small store with limited assortment and one single operator.

Why is it inconvenient to work through your personal account

The first and main problem is that he private… That is, there is only one entry point. If we have several managers, they need to take turns working.

The second inconvenience is that it is worth switching from one chat to another, and the message in the previous one is marked as read. It will no longer be possible to return it to its previous status. Regulatory building begins and agreements on marks with colors, asterisks and other tricks in order not to lose chats with customers and understand what state they are in.

If there is more than one store, for example, there are several of them (the company is large, they decided to divide products into categories and sell computers separately from plumbing, for example) – each support specialist must have several browsers open, according to the number of stores. Alternatively, different browsers or even computers. If this prospect still does not delight you, add to this the need for multiple authorizations. Simply put: “Welcome to hell, fighter!”

API was integrated, but not integrated

Yes, AliExpress has a great API for integration. But, as we mentioned in article about the features of organizing information exchange with marketplaces, the Chinese site has a certain inertia in updating methods. If AliExpress itself does not consider some functionality to be paramount, then we find ourselves in a situation where there seems to be an API for chat integration, but in fact it is not. And what is offered – a place in the local history museum. The problem is clear, but we are integrators, which means we have to find a solution. And we found him. I’m telling you!

First of all, we implemented our own service, which parses the personal accounts we need and puts all chats into a single interface that is available to all support managers. They gave each specialist the opportunity to see an unlimited number of stores from among those to which he was admitted. In the chats themselves, we added the functionality of changing the status, reassigning the person in charge, grouping by stores, sorting and searching for the desired message. Of course, they also provided for the possibility of collecting statistics – I want to know how quickly a particular manager responds to messages, what is his productivity and load.

At this stage, we were faced with the fact that AliExpress considers multiple calls to different stores to be suspicious and does not like very much when it is scrapped. Combined with the security requirements of the client, this leads to an endless stream of requests for re-authorization with the introduction of a code, captchas and the delights of two-factor authentication via mail or phone. We have spent a lot of effort so that we are not thrown out of sessions and can safely use the interface.

The problem had to be solved in several steps. First of all, after registering a store, we set up automatic forwarding of letters with a specific template from the mailbox specified during registration – to our internal mail server. As a result, the authorization request goes to internal mail, which the secure authentication system has access to. The robot parses the received letter, finds the confirmation code and substitutes it in response to the marketplace.

If the request contains captcha, we use paid parsing services. For the option of authentication via the client’s phone, we have configured a telegram bot that sends a request to the client’s number associated with the store. But this situation is extremely rare.

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Business requirements do not always coincide with what the creators of marketplaces intended. But, with a certain ingenuity and understanding of how the information exchange between the seller and the site is arranged, any problem can be solved. Anton Batashov was with you. If you have any questions, write them in the comments or send them to @anton_batashov telegram.