Feature request: More and better APIs!

It’d be really great to see more and better APIs for Tindie. Specifically, I’m thinking:

• Fetching, inserting, and deleting shipping rates
• Marking orders as shipped
• Updating stock levels
• Getting product information (I know this one is here, but it’s undocumented and doesn’t include product options)

Also, a few other misc requests:

• The shipping rates page really needs to show more details, including a brief listing of products covered under each rate. Even better, restructuring into a matrix with countries and product groups. Right now, if I want to get rid of a rate, I have to first click ‘edit’ to check it’s the one I want, then click ‘delete’, then confirm the deletion.
• Contrary to what the rate creation page says, adding a duplicate rate doesn’t override it; you end up with the old rate associated with 0 products, but still present.
• It ought to be possible to add unpublished or out of stock products to communities, so they will show up when the product’s ready.
• First-party Shipwire integration would be awesome! Plus, Tindie would get 30c/order for doing it.

Oh, and one last really important one: When users click to send sellers a message on product or order info pages, no information about where they were when they clicked is sent. So I regularly get users saying “How fast is this?” or “My box arrived dinged up” without any idea what product or order they’re talking about.

BIG agreement on:

• API for get/put stock status for products
• API for marking orders as shipped
• API to get production information including options, prices, basically everything
• Related product on direct messages

I also regularly get questions about products and have zero idea what product they are referring to.

Also, what happened to the idea of having a default “shipped” message? I’m really tired of cutting and pasting the same message to buyers every time I ship.

I can work on the default shipped message this weekend. That has come up enough where I get it- we’ll add it.

On the APIs- its a question of priorities. I totally get it why it would be great, however only a small subset of sellers currently use the existing API. Adding more APIs that a smaller subset will use, is just a tough one to call. If every seller said “build this!!” we would but we aren’t at that point yet. (But trust me, I get it)

Yeah that’s the balance. Not unlike building boards. If I built every variant everyone asked for…

Maybe that APIs can wait. I can wait for it for awhile, not a big deal. I still haven’t integrated Tindie with Endicia yet. If I do, I guess I should post up so others can benefit?\

Or maybe someone else has done this already.

Obviously you need to prioritise; my post was mostly a wishlist.

Showing the page/product that a user was viewing when they sent a message is really important, though, and it’s a source of ongoing pain. Can that be prioritised, please?

Default shipping message is live!

I see messages now include where they were sent from too - thanks!

I am also interesting the API’s. I understand not a lot of people use them but maybe more will with more options, like stock counts. I would start using it if it had that.

H to all friends !

I have opened the shop by very few days and I was just worried on how I can track at least the basic stats for my products. I see that it is possible to include analytics together with my site also Tindie. Where can I find more technical details about how to ?

Many thanks. Enrico

@alicemirror welcome! 2 things - linking to your google analytics is a start. That will give you access to how many people hit your pages, from where, etc.

We’re soon rolling out access to referral data we have on each order. For the last few weeks & months, we’ve been logging referral data on where a customer originated. That will give sellers more data and hopefully better targeting outside of Tindie.

Hi, thank you for your answer. I agree that “more and better API” will be perfect. But in the meantime as I know how much when and who see the products, I can make a couple of calculations: frankly I prefer Tindie then other shops, including Etsy that I am selling too. I am promoting the products joined with my articles I publish on electroschematics.com but until now I hae kept Etsy as the “main” (I mean most linked) shop just because I have no idea on how I can see stats from Tindle…

Cheers. Enrico