AmeriCommerce Data Integration with Snowflake

With Portable, integrate AmeriCommerce data with your Snowflake warehouse in minutes. Access your cloud-based e-Commerce platform data from Snowflake without having to manage cumbersome ETL scripts.

The Two Paths to Connect AmeriCommerce to Snowflake

There are two ways to sync data from AmeriCommerce into your data warehouse for analytics.

Method 1: Manually Developing a Custom Data Pipeline Yourself

Write code from scratch or use an open-source framework to build an integration between AmeriCommerce and Snowflake.

Method 2: Automating the ETL Process with a No-Code Solution

Leverage a pre-built connector from a cloud-hosted solution like Portable.

How to Create Value with AmeriCommerce Data

Teams connect AmeriCommerce to their data warehouse to build dashboards and generate value for their business. Let’s dig into the capabilities AmeriCommerce exposes via their API, outline insights you can build with the data, and summarize the most common analytics environments that teams are using to process their AmeriCommerce data.

Extract: What Data Can You Extract from the AmeriCommerce API?

AmeriCommerce is a cloud-based e-Commerce platform used for managing products across high volume online stores.

To help clients power downstream analytics, AmeriCommerce offers an application programming interface (API) for clients to extract data on business entities. Here are a few example entities you can extract from the API:

People
Orders
Catalog
Contents
Marketing
Settings
System
Tools

You can visit the AmeriCommerce API Documentation to explore the entire catalog of available API resources and the complete schema definition for each.

As you think about the data you will need for analytics, don’t forget that Portable offers no-code integrations to other similar applications.

Regardless of the SaaS solution you use, it’s important to find a cloud-based e-Commerce platform with robust data available for analytics.

Load: Which Destinations Are Best for Your AmeriCommerce ETL Pipeline?

To turn raw data from AmeriCommerce into dashboards, most companies centralize information into a data warehouse or data lake. For Portable clients, the most common ETL pipelines are:

Once you have a destination to load the data, it’s common to combine AmeriCommerce data with information from other enterprise applications like Jira, Mailchimp, HubSpot, Zendesk, and Klaviyo.

From there, you can build cross-functional dashboards in a visualization tool like Power BI, Tableau, Looker, or Retool.

Develop: Which Dashboards Should You Build with AmeriCommerce Data?

Now that you have identified the data you want to extract, the next step is to plan out the dashboards you can build with the data.

As a process, you want to consume raw data, overlay SQL logic, and build a dashboard to either 1) increase revenue or 2) decrease costs.

Replicating AmeriCommerce data into your cloud data warehouse can unlock a wide array of opportunities to power analytics, automate workflows, and develop products. The use cases are endless.

Now that we have a clear sense of the insights we can create, let’s compare the process of developing a custom AmeriCommerce integration with the benefits of using a no-code ETL solution like Portable.

Method 1: Building a Custom AmeriCommerce ETL Pipeline

To build your own AmeriCommerce integration, there are three steps:

Navigate the AmeriCommerce API documentation
Make your first API request
Turn an API request into a complete data pipeline

Let’s walk through the process in more detail.

How to Interpret AmeriCommerce’s API Documentation

When reading API documentation, there are a handful of key concepts to consider.

Authentication

There are many common authentication mechanisms. OAuth 2.0 (Auth Code and Client Credentials), API Keys, JWT Tokens, Personal Access Tokens, Basic Authentication, etc. For AmeriCommerce, it’s important to identify the authentication mechanism and how best to incorporate the necessary credentials into your API requests.

For convenience to developers writing private integrations that only ever use a single user or run headless, AmeriCommerce Online Stores provides a way to create a non-expiring access token from the admin console. There are certain limitations to this type of token, such as not being able to access some types of encrypted data.

The other way to obtain access tokens is via OAuth 2. This is the more secure way to integrate an application with the API and it enforces token expiration. Additionally, if the app is acting on the behalf of particular users, OAuth is a requirement, as the user will then be able to sign in with their admin credentials and use the app just like they would use the admin console.

Resources

It’s important to identify the AmeriCommerce API endpoints you want to use for analytics. Most APIs offer a combination of GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE request methods; however, for analytics, GET requests are typically the most useful. At times, POST requests can be used to extract data as well.

For AmeriCommerce, the attributes endpoint is a great place to get started.

Request Parameters

For each API endpoint you would like to use for analytics, you need to understand the method (GET, POST, PUT, or DELETE) and the URL, but there are other considerations to take into account as well. You should look out for pagination mechanics, query parameters, and parameters that are added to the request path.

Some API endpoints require unique identifiers from a previous API response to be included in the URL path. For instance, to update a profile, you need a profile_id that is returned from another endpoint.

How Do You Call the AmeriCommerce API? (Tutorial)

Follow the instructions above to read the AmeriCommerce API documentation
Identify and collect your credentials for authentication
Pick the API resource you want to pull data from
Configure the necessary parameters, method, and URL to make your first request (e.g. with curl or Postman)
Add your credentials and make your first API call . Here is an example request using curl (without real credentials):

curl --request GET       
--url https://www.yoursite.com/api/v1/attributes       
--header 'Content-Type: application/json'       
--header 'X-AC-Auth-Token: '

How Do You Maintain a Custom AmeriCommerce to Snowflake ETL Pipeline?

Making a call to the AmeriCommerce API is just the beginning of maintaining a complete custom ETL pipeline.

Here is a getting-started guide to building a production-grade pipeline for AmeriCommerce:

For each API endpoint, define schemas (which fields exist and the type for each)
Process the API response and parse the data (typically parsing JSON or XML)
Handle and replicate nested objects and custom fields
Identify which AmeriCommerce fields are primary keys and which keys are required vs. optional
Version control your changes in a git-based workflow (using GitHub, GitLab, etc.)
Handle code dependencies in your toolchain and the upgrades that come with each
Monitor the health of the upstream API, and —when things go wrong— troubleshoot via the status page, reach out to support, and open tickets
Handle error codes (HTTP error codes like 400s, 500s, etc.)
Manage and respect rate limits imposed by the server

We won’t go into detail on all of the items above, but rate limits are a great example of the complexity found in a production-grade data pipeline.

We enforce a rate limit for how many requests an application and/or token can make in a designated period of time. There are two types of REST API applications: installed and custom. Installed apps are those that are available to be installed directly from the Online Store Apps & addons section or a 3rd party integration app. Custom apps are those that you create manually for a specific store.

Installed apps are subject to the max rate limit of 50 calls per 10 second window, regardless of your plan level. All installed apps for a particular store combine toward this one overall limit. Custom apps are subject to a separate rate limit that will vary based on your plan level. The maxium rate limit for custom apps is also 50 calls per 10 second window. The rate limit for custom apps will scale up as your plan level increases. Below are the rate limits by plan level:

Steel: 5 Calls/10 second window
Bronze: 10 calls/10 second window
Silver: 20 calls/10 second window
Gold+: 50 calls/10 second window

All responses from the API include the header X-AC-Call-Limit which includes the number of calls made against that store and the total number of calls allowed. This currently resets every 10 seconds. If the limit is exceeded, the API will return the response 429 - Too Many Requests and will include an additional header Retry-After. The Retry-After header indicates what time the counter will reset and requests can resume.

If you don’t respect rate limits, and if you can’t handle server responses (like 429 errors with a Retry-After header), your pipeline can break, and analytics can become out-of-date.

What Are the Drawbacks of Building the AmeriCommerce ETL Pipeline Yourself?

You can probably tell at this point that there is a lot of work that goes into building and maintaining an ETL pipeline from AmeriCommerce to your data warehouse.

If you want less development work, faster insights, and no ongoing responsibilities, you should consider a cloud-hosted ETL solution.

Let’s walk through the setup process for a no-code ETL solution and its benefits.

Method 2: Using a No-Code AmeriCommerce ETL Solution

No-code ETL solutions are simple. Vendors specialize in building and maintaining data pipelines on your behalf. Instead of starting from scratch for each integration. Companies like Portable create connector templates that can be leveraged by hundreds or thousands of clients.

Step-By-Step Tutorial for Configuring Your AmeriCommerce ETL Pipeline

Off-the-shelf ETL tools offer a no-code setup process. Here are the instructions to connect AmeriCommerce to your cloud data warehouse with Portable.

Create an account (no credit card required)
Add a source —search for and select AmeriCommerce
Authenticate with AmeriCommerce using the instructions in the Portable console
Select Snowflake and authenticate
Set up a flow connecting AmeriCommerce to your analytics environment
Run your flow to replicate data from AmeriCommerce to your warehouse
Use the dropdown to set your data flow to run on a cadence

What Are the Benefits of Using Portable for AmeriCommerce ETL?

No-Code Simplicity

Start moving AmeriCommerce data in minutes. Save yourself the headaches of reading API documentation, writing code, and worrying about maintenance. Leave the hassle to us.

Easy to Understand Pricing

With predictable, fixed-cost pricing per data flow, you know exactly how much your AmeriCommerce integration will cost every month.

Fast Development Speeds

Access lightning-fast connector development. Portable can build new integrations on-demand in hours or days.

Hands-On Support

APIs change. Schemas evolve. AmeriCommerce will have maintenance issues and errors. With Portable, we will do everything in our power to make your life easier.

Unlimited Data Volumes

You can move as much data from AmeriCommerce to Snowflake as you want without worrying about usage credits or overages. Instead of analyzing your ETL costs, you should be analyzing your data.

Free to Get Started

Sign up and get started for free. You don’t need a credit card to manually trigger a data sync, so you can try all of our connectors before paying a dime.