Overview

Overview

The Ka-ching system contains a number of flexible APIs for importing various types of data in various use cases.

Most of the examples shown here has been added to a Postman collection that you can download on the resources page.

The data types that can currently be imported are:

• Attributes
• Attribute groups
• Discount campaigns
• Expenses
• Incoming orders
• Facets
• Folders
• Product Assets
• Product groups
• Product recommendations
• Product rules
• Products
• Recommendation Categories
• Stock
• Tabs
• Tags

The common way to perform the import is through our https import endpoints. We recommend that data is pushed to the Ka-ching system on every data change in the integrating system. This will provide for real-time data updates in the entire chain. An alternative to this solution is to batch import updated products periodically, but that naturally eliminates the real-time aspect of the integration.

Some data can also be imported as CSV-files through our Back Office. This feature is only intended for a quick-start setup, since this requires manual steps, and the CSV format is not very well suited for hierarchically structured data like for instance our Products. This means that the flat CSV format cannot describe all available details for our products.

Finally data can be imported through actions performed in our clients. Please refer to Runtime integrations for documentation about these 'runtime' integrations.

Image Import

The Image Import varies from the above in that it has no direct endpoint. Instead an account can be configured to use image importing or not, and if image importing is enabled, then all referenced images will be processed by an image import queue and be placed in the Ka-ching system CDN.

There are both advantages and disadvantages to enabling image importing:

Advantages of using image importing

• The Ka-ching system CDN is operated by Google and has nodes all over the world, so downloading resources is fast.
• Images added to the Ka-ching system CDN will automatically have thumbnails generated
• If content is deleted from your own CDN they will still be available in the Ka-ching CDN
• The POS client lives in the iOS ecosystem where App Transport Security is enabled. This means that security for http requests are enforced, basically disallowing non-https request and https TLS versions that are deemed insecure. If your images are imported to the Ka-ching CDN, they will be served from a secure connection that is verified to run with App Transport Security.

Reasons for not using image importing

• We have set a size limitation of 2048x2048 pixels in our image importer, since the memory pressure for the image processing is expensive. Hosting your own images circumvents this limitation although having larger images will also be costly in traffic to each of the POS clients.
• If you have a fast and stable CDN for hosting your images - and they are already in an appropriate format, then you may as well continue to use that.