Integration guide

Retailer onboarding

1. A retailer signs up for NearSt. For any of our official partners, we have dedicated landing pages that the partner can direct customers to. Retailers can also sign up directly from the near.st (opens in a new tab) home page.
2. Our team does a quick call to qualify the shop (are they a physical retailer, do they sell barcoded products or hold product titles and images in their POS, do they track quantities).
3. Depending on the agreed structure with our Partnerships team, we will then:
   1. Automatically send the retailer an email with their Upload Key and instructions on how to enter it into their POS to activate the NearSt connection.
   2. Automatically send the POS partner an email notification to let them know a new customer of theirs has signed up with NearSt and what credentials to use to upload their stock.
4. Once we see the first upload of stock information come in for the retailer, they are introduced to our Customer Success team, who will walk them through our retailer dashboard and explain the relevant NearSt functionality.

Partner Dashboard

Within the NearSt Partner Dashboard (opens in a new tab), you can keep track of the list of your retailers that has signed up with NearSt, check their connection stability and past upload records, and find developer and marketing tools.

You will get access to the Partner Dashboard as part of your onboarding by the NearSt Partnerships team.

Building the integration

Here are some key things to think about when building the integration:

1. Setting up a cron job
   NearSt ideally receives an updated stock feed every 15 minutes. We automatically expire products for which we haven't received any uploads in the last 7 days. Consider what the best way is to run a consistent job to upload the stock feed in your setup.
   
   

2. Uploading the stock feed
   We provide two main routes to upload stock information to NearSt:

   1. FTP: a simple protocol, for which most programming languages have built-in libraries.
      Documentation →
      Code examples →
   2. HTTP: a two-step API call, first to retrieve the upload URL, then using a PUT request to upload the actual CSV file.
      Documentation →
      Code examples →
      
      

3. Storing the customer's credentials
   Every store on NearSt has its own unique Upload Key. In the case of FTP this is used as the FTP password. Common patterns include:

   1. Letting the user enter this in a settings panel in your application. Once the user enters the NearSt Upload Key, you can start the first upload.
   2. Saving it for the user once they sign up with NearSt. We can automatically send you email notifications with the customer's business information and their upload key whenever a new customer of yours signs up with NearSt.