In 2021, we have been developing several services focusing on “Makeshop”, which is one of the EC platforms that are often used in Japan.
In this article, I would like to talk about Makeshop related services that SEM Technology can support.
What is Makeshop?
Makeshop is one of the e-commerce platforms used in Japan and is provided by the GMO Group. It has existed for a relatively long time among EC platforms, and there are many sites using it.
In addition to simply selling products on the web, this service has various functions such as coupon functions, discount functions for bulk purchases, membership management functions, and membership shop construction.
The price is set at 11,000 yen (tax included) per month, so you can start using it relatively cheaply.
In addition, the vendor is also a group company of GMO Internet, which is listed on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
Using the Makeshop API
In Makeshop, API usage is open to Makeshop partners and users. SEM Technology also became a Makeshop partner in October 2020 and has been able to use the Makeshop API since then.
With the Makeshop API, you can acquire and update member information, product information, and order information through a programming language. By using the API, you can automatically acquire these data accumulated on Makeshop and link them with other services.
Examples of services provided by SEM Technology
During the year 2021, SEM Technology has been working on developing various related services using the Makeshop API. We have developed four services: “Measurement implementation of Google Analytics”, “BigQuery accumulation of EC data”, “Visualization of order data by data portal”, and “Facebook ad conversion API support”.
I would like to take a closer look at each.
Google Analytics measurement implementation
First of all, it is a measurement implementation of Google Analytics that can be said to be basic. By default, Makeshop is equipped with a function that allows you to automatically measure, including e-commerce, when you enter the GA tracking ID on the management screen.
However, the recent mainstream is tag management using Google Tag Manager. The Makeshop standard does not provide a way to implement e-commerce tags from Tagmane, so customization is required.
With Makeshop, you can implement a set of implementations that allow you to implement Google Analytics e-commerce while using Google Tag Manager.
BigQuery construction of EC data
We provide a service that acquires “member information”, “product information” and “order information” accumulated in Makeshop every day by batch processing and stores them in BigQuery.
Data stored in BigQuery can be used in a variety of ways, such as integrating with other data sources owned by the company, or freely extracting data using SQL and linking it to a spreadsheet.
Especially recently, there has been an increase in the number of cases where it is used to solve the need to visualize data stored in Makeshop with Tableau or Data Portal.
Service introduction – BigQuery data linkage (Makeshop version)
Visualize Order Data with Data Portal
We implement and provide a community connector for “Google Data Portal”, one of the dashboard services provided by Google.
By using the Makeshop connector, you can easily build a Google Data Portal dashboard that uses Makeshop purchase data as a data source, and you can also update the data automatically using the API.
The use of this community connector is provided completely free of charge, and anyone who uses Makeshop can use it at no additional cost (to use the Makeshop API, the API (Please note that you will need to obtain an authentication key.)
However, I don’t know if the data portal connector mechanism is not very good or if I don’t understand best practices, but the processing is very heavy and errors occur frequently on large-scale EC sites with a lot of sales. It seems that there is also something to do.
Conversion API support for Facebook Ads
In 2021, we have more opportunities to hear about the conversion API of Facebook ads. In particular, I’ve seen many blog posts about implementing a conversion API in combination with server-side Google Tag Manager.
With some EC platforms such as Shopify, Facebook integration is done on the platform side, and conversion API can be used with simple operations on the EC platform.
However, many e-commerce platforms, including Makeshop, do not have such integration. The conversion API implemented by SEM Technology this time is a service for implementing the conversion API using the Makeshop API.
Using Makeshop API as a trigger to purchase a product, conversion data is sent from Makeshop’s server to Facebook via SEM Technology’s server (strictly speaking, using Google Cloud’s Cloud Function). Therefore, even if the transmission of the conversion tag on the browser is lost, the conversion information can be reliably sent to Facebook from the server side.
If you thought Makeshop didn’t support the conversion API, good news.
Service introduction – Facebook conversion API implementation (Makeshop version)
Future development and summary
I think I was able to experience all the things that can be done using Makeshop’s API. Therefore, we hope to be able to conduct API research and service development targeting other platforms next year.
If possible, I would like to focus on platforms that can connect online and real (payment platforms such as POS registers, reservation management platforms, event management platforms, etc.). If you are interested in running such a platform, please contact us from the inquiry form and we will consider it.
