twotap

[twotap]

Product classification using keras, word vectors, and images (with code)

Less than a year ago we started working on incorporating product feeds into Two Tap. Product catalogs have traditionally not been our focus, but we're working on a number of projects that depend on having a great product database.

Two Tap has to take large CSV files from thousands of retailers, each with their own way of having product information, and show them under one unified (and sane) API. Building a feed injection pipeline is not the purpose of this blog post, though we might write about it at a later time.

The goal today is to describe how we are taking raw product information and assigning products to our own taxonomy. There are lot of companies that offer this as a service. However we've decided to open-source everything related to the classification component. You'll get the code and the pre-trained models. And we're hoping you might want to contribute back if you find it useful.

Disclaimer:

This is v1.0 of the model. This is not only our first ML project, it's also our first Python initiative in a long time.

The input data is manually labeled by our team. If you find any errors please let us know.

This first model is really bad at categorizing electronics. The reason is the training data is mostly Apparel.

It's relatively easy for us to add more products types if we already support a retailer. Ping us with the stores you'd like to see in our dataset, and if they agree, we'll include them.

We expect to release a new version once every month or so.

How we labeled the data:

The goal is to allow publishers to built an experience like taptapcart.com, the demo B2C marketplace we created on top of our API. The first version of taptapcart was reliant on retailer taxonomy, and it was a huge mess to navigate. Some stores have "Clothing", others have "Apparel", some have only deeply nested categories.

Two Tap's team enables a feed inside Two Tap after applying to the store's affiliate program and receiving access to their daily updated CSV file containing lots of products. Once the feed is injected and processed, Two Tap's internal dashboard allows our team to go and manually assign store categories to a Two Tap taxonomy. The Two Tap taxonomy is a combination of the categories provided by buy.com and Google Shopping.

This is our input data.

How we built the model:

We decided to use keras, jupyter notebook, and our puny laptops for development work. We took a snapshot of our product DB and created one big training.csv file.

The model we ended up with learns based on the product title and images. We tried different approaches, like:

binary_crossentropy and training with each subcategory (eg the label data for Apparel & Accessories~~Clothing~~Activewear was [ 1, 1, 1, 0, 0 .. ] where the index is [ 'Apparel & Accessories', 'Apparel & Accessories~~Clothing', 'Apparel & Accessories~~Clothing~~Activewear', ..]

categorical_crossentropy which was an mistake as it penalises matches on Apparel & Accessories~~Clothing~~Activewear if it finds Apparel & Accessories~~Clothing.

With or without the product categories. With or without the first sentence from the product description.

In the end what worked the best, to our suprise, was the simplest possible approach. Just title + images + one hot encoding.

Color matching

As we were working on the category model, there was a moment when nothing was working. We decided to take a step back and tackle a "simpler" problem: product image colors.

Primary image colors can be trickier to figure out that it appears: there's skin color, background color, multiple colors, etc.

Instead of manually labelling the data we took a different approach. We looped through each product in our DB and looked at the color text names. If it matched some common names: "black", "silver", "gold", "tan", "purple", we would save it.

Then, for one grueling day, we manually looked through 250k product images to clean up any mistakes. The end result were directories of images like "black/, "blue/", etc.

To train this model we again used Inception V3. However, even with this simple use case, clear training data, and a pre-created architecture like Inception, the first model was terrible.

This is where we learned about class_weights. Our data set was skewed, we had 90k black, 20k blue, and 4k green. With class_weights you can penalize a mistake on green a lot higher than one on black.

This was a huge learning for the category model as well, and things started working after incorporating this change.

How we trained the model:

Once we were happy with the initial results we wanted to train the whole model. There were about 800k data points for categories, meaning 800k product images. We choose to use Azure as their GPU instances are pretty great.

After generating an Azure File Storage and mounting via SMB to a smaller instance, we ran a script called download_images.py that went through our training data to fetch all the required images. This took a couple of days.

Once we had the images, we created another instance, a NC12 (12 cores, 112 GB memory), and mounted the SMB file share there. We used Ubuntu and this incredibly helpful script: https://github.com/leestott/Azure-GPU-Setup to enable tensorflow/keras with GPU support. I wouldn't waste time with Azure's precreated data-science instances, this approach provided more flexibility and was incredibly easy to use.

The last step was to start a 'screen' session that runs train.py. We first trained the color model, and then the categories one.

Check out the repos

Categories and Colors.

Test it out

You can try the end result here. We'll be taking this public endpoint down in a week or so as we internalize the models. You can paste any URL from any of Two Tap's supported stores.

Where do we go from here?

The next step is incorporating this model into our backend. To that effect we'll be using a flask instance sitting on a smaller Azure server processing jobs.

We'll be going back to have a closer look at the labeled data.

We want to add feeds from a more diverse set of retailers (the data set is highly skewed toward apparel at this point).

Once this project matures a bit we hope to extend it for HS code labelling.

One more thing...

We've launched one more OSS project. A WooCommerce plugin that allows non US retailers to sell US products just by drag & dropping items from Two Tap's inventory.

Check it out here. We'd love some feedback!

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Two Tap Helps Pitney Bowes Accelerate Adoption of Borderfree Retail Platform

In today’s interconnected world of commerce, retailers face a difficult challenge: the cost and complexity of integrating technologies with external partners to remain competitive and deliver the best products and services. Different technology standards used by external partners and retailers make such integrations even more difficult, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in development time and increasing time to market. For the Borderfree Retail solution – a global shopping platform owned by Pitney Bowes with over 200 global stores – ensuring order placements are fast, accurate, and reliable is a critical challenge and piece of this software integration puzzle. This challenge is particularly relevant given that retail eCommerce sales will reach $1.915 trillion in 2016, accounting for 8.7% of total retail spending worldwide. While the pace of growth for overall retail sales is subdued, the digital portion of sales continues to expand rapidly, with a 23.7% growth rate forecast for 2016. Retail ecommerce sales are projected to increase to $4.058 trillion in 2020, making up 14.6% of total retail spending that year (source: eMarketer).

The solution

Today we formally announced our partnership with Pitney Bowes. For two years and counting, Two Tap has been providing automated order placement -- via one simple software integration -- in the Borderfree platform that helps to significantly reduce time to market and months of costly development time on separate order placement integrations. Using the Two Tap Gateway – an eCommerce order integration platform that enables over 1,400 retailers to integrate with external partners – retailers from the U.S., Australia, and the U.K. on the Borderfree platform are reaching an expanding base of international consumers. Two Tap Gateway is the easiest way for retailers to integrate with an external partner and automate both domestic and international orders. In addition, on Black Friday 2015, Two Tap helped the Borderfree Retail platform seamlessly manage its international order capture process during the popular holiday shopping weekend. Retailers on the platform that had the Two Tap solution enabled were able to quickly capture and process all placed orders very quickly, accurately, and reliably.

Oh, one more thing...

We also recently announced Two Tap Crossborder, the first fully automated service that allows consumers outside of the U.S. to order products from American retailers just as easy as buying locally in their own country. Crossborder is available to any U.S. retailer as an add-on to Two Tap Gateway. U.S. retailers can now expand global sales to shoppers anywhere in the world without making any changes to their existing infrastructure. Retailers that sign up for the new Two Tap Crossborder service can start selling their products inside any international app or marketplace. As Two Tap Gateway evolves, we’re eager to continue getting feedback from our retailer and publisher partners. We’re also excited to continue our momentum in helping retailers and publishers make money and save costs with our simple yet powerful software. Together, we can make the global eCommerce ecosystem continue to evolve and thrive!

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Migrating a Two Tap API integration to support international orders

This blog post is a technical followup on the Two Tap Cross-Border launch. You should read the announcement before continuing.

If you are using our Whitelabel Cart or Instant, you don't need to do anything, but you might still want to read below to understand a couple of differences between domestic and international ordering.

Overview

In domestic and pickup-from-store orders Two Tap sends all the information to the retailer to be processed. That means the end retailer (let's say Kohl's) processes the payment, handles returns, customer support, and is the merchant of record. This is what we call the pass-through method.

For international orders, this all changes. The end customer (let's say in Japan) buys the products from Two Tap, which are then, in the background, automatically purchased by Two Tap from the retailer and shipped to a US warehouse. This means Two Tap processes the consumer payment, handles returns, customer support, and is the merchant of record.

For international orders Two Tap provides more flexibility:

A larger number of payment methods will be supported. For instance: Apple Pay, Android Pay. (coming soon)

The CVV code will not be required after an initial purchase. (coming soon)

Publisher discounts (eg. a publisher wanting to fund $10 off offers).

One international landed cost for the whole cart. Shipping prices are more affordable as Two Tap consolidates products into one box and ships them overseas in one international flight.

Estimation guarantees. If Two Tap's estimation is wrong, Two Tap will eat the cost.

The international app approval process is a bit more thorough, and all apps must show the "Two Tap INTL ToS Approval Box".

API Changes

/cart, /cart/status, /cart/estimates now accept a 'destination_country'.

'destination_country' changes prices and currencies dynamically. Please keep in mind that if you run /cart/estimates without an address or destination_country and Two Tap returns some prices in USD, those might change completely when you run /purchase with a Japanese address. Make sure you are showing the consumer the right estimates.

estimates and sites[id][prices] not available for international orders

In /cart/estimates and /purchase/status Two Tap used to return the prices broken down by site_id. For instances, $150 final price at Kohls, and $200 final price at eBags. For domestic orders this doesn't change.

Today we are introducing two new fields: estimated_total_prices for /cart/estimates, and total_prices for /purchase/status. Here you will find the total values for the whole cart.

They way we handled this API change on our Cart is that we show the 'estimated_total_prices' on the cart review page, for both domestic and international orders. We also added an extra option on domestic orders to 'view a breakdown of prices by store'.

http_finished_url is gone, meet http_update_url

'http_update_url' is called after a purchase changes state. State are: 'pending', 'info_running', 'info_finished', 'confirm_running', 'confirm_finished', 'waiting_for_tracking_links', 'to_warehouse', 'to_shopper', 'done', and 'cancelled'.

For domestic purchases a purchase changes state after injection or when a change happens in the 'sites[site_id][remote_status]' /purchase/status fields. Yes, Two Tap is slowly starting to monitor purchases after they've been injected, and will send you updates as they happen.

For international purchases, this means a change in a new 'status' /purchase/status field.

The information sent is the same as in the /purchase/status API method.

Available shipping countries

The available shipping countries are sent with /cart/status inside the sites[id][shipping_countries_support] field.

These are all the changes you need to know about. Feel free to contact us with any questions.

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Introducing Two Tap Crossborder

Six months ago we realized that, at 1200+ non-Shopify integrations we've figured out how to scale and grow to support any retailer that publishers would like us to provide access to. This allowed us to take a deep breath, and look at the industry as a whole. And we noticed something. Our team in Europe would create an Excel sheet of products they'd like to buy from the US, assign one person to place the order, which turned into one big package to be delivered at our remote office. Almost every month, in order to save on shipping. Two Tap Crossborder has evolved from this observation.

Introducing Two Tap Crossborder

Living in the US is a bit like living in a bubble and a lot of things are taken for granted. For instance, the US has an amazing selection of *high quality* products at affordable prices. Since we started this project we've heard stories from expats buying paper towels while vising the US -- because it's higher quality. More often international consumers love buying diapers, vitamins and apparel. However, there are some serious challenges for consumers: * Shipping is expensive. When ordering internationally customers are forced to buy large carts from big retailers in order to make the experience cost-effective. But that's not what they want. They might want to buy vitamins from Target, socks from Macys, toys from BabiesRUs, and maybe a dress for a new brand that popped up that's US only. * Their payment methods are not accepted. There's a high chance their credit card will get flagged as fraud, or maybe they don't even have a credit card (hello AliPay!). * Consumers don't understand the localized retailer sites. Leaving aside the fact that a huge part of the world doesn't speak English, when they navigate US retailer sites most consumers are confused because they are used to completely different local experiences. With Two Tap Crossborder we wanted to solve these problems and make it incredibly easy for international shoppers to order products usually found in the US. It starts from our belief that local publishers/apps will convert better than applications that try to be global. For instance, an end-to-end Japanese app, from product discovery all the way to checkout, will convert better than an app that was designed for a German audience and translated to Japanese. Two Tap now offers local eCommerce entrepreneurs a whole new world of inventory. While in the first iteration TT Crossborder will support only credit cards, we'll quickly expand to support a large number of payment methods. We'll do our best to optimize in local markets so that as many transactions as possible will go through, and keep fees low. And lastly, we've designed Two Tap Crossborder with automatic product consolidation in mind. The true value of the universal shopping cart is that a consumer can add products from N number of retailers, and instead of paying N international air freight shipping prices, they will pay ONE price. Two Tap ships all products from US retailers to one warehouse, where they are shipped in one package overseas, making the whole process affordable. On the retailer side, Two Tap provides a risk free way of supporting a global audience. For international orders Two Tap will be the merchant of record, handling customer support, returns, and building infrastructure to support this global audience. This means there's ZERO risk and ZERO integration on the store's part. The API is available today for Japan, with other areas coming online soon.

One more thing....

We were so excited while building this functionality into Two Tap, that we decided to build something on top of our API as well. Our first B2C product. taptapcart.com is group buying with free shipping if the cart is large enough. You and your family or coworkers can group together, add products in one common cart, and once a certain magic price is reached (it depends on a number of factors) Two Tap will send your products to you with NO shipping costs. Unlike older group buying attempts where consumers were forced to buy one certain product at a time, with taptapcart consumers can buy any product they desire from our huge number of supported retailers. Social commerce with benefits.

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How to ensure 100% reliability when scraping in ecommerce

It's been about two a half years since we started working on Two Tap. Even now the most common question we get asked is "how reliable is Two Tap?". Or in a different format, this questions gets asked as "what percentage of orders do actually get sent through?”

The purpose of this article is to share (a little bit too much) information about how Two Tap works and how we achieved 100% reliability on placing orders with any of our supported retailers. Hopefully, our internal procedures will inspire other companies that deal with scraping.

Two Tap integrates with retailers using scraping.

We built the system like this based on our previous experiences in ecommerce and working with retailers and publishers. This was not an easy choice. Leaving aside the technical difficulties, engineers sometimes have a gut reaction to our approach – they consider it unreliable (“What if the integration breaks?”). It takes us around 10 minutes to explain our internals until we can alleviate these worries.

When we were running affiliate networks a long time ago we understood that retailer priorities are different than what we thought they were. We wrote an article about it here, but tldr is that retailers are focused on their core processes. This means keeping their websites up on Black Friday and improving loyalty/email retention versus trying to build tens of different deep integrations with their platforms. Most of these third party solutions each bring insignificant amounts of orders compared to the integration effort.

The second thing we understood is that deep technical integrations break just as often as scraping approaches. The PR of a lot of platforms says "it's just a quick painless plugin install", but the reality of that retailers heavily customize their platforms. Leaving aside the fact that often times retailers have to change payment providers, these cartridges are almost never drag and drop, and cause really odd and hard to debug bugs. Once retailers upgrade their platforms the plugins break as well.

No more philosophical discussions, how is Two Tap more reliable?

Two Tap now supports 1120+ retailers and any Shopify store is supported out of the box when they sign up for Two Tap. No other solution is even close to supporting as many stores as Two Tap does. What happens when an integration breaks?

The first thing we learned is that integration breakage is not the most common problem. By far, the biggest problem is retailer websites not responding for whatever reason. This is an issue that affects deep integrations as well. Retailers, like all companies, have a DB, an ISP, a network provider, a data center provider, and they receive a lot of traffic. As a platform you take an order from a consumer and send it somewhere, and that somewhere might not respond.

If you are publisher sending orders never trust an API that doesn't handle things asynchronously for this specific reason. It means that an API might fail for reasons that don’t depend on itself, and if the API provider isn’t handling that edge case, you will have to take care of it. Retailer availability issues happen more often than you think, especially when scaling to 1200+ stores.

And here’s the main aspect of how Two Tap works. Two Tap receives an order from an app or consumer and adds it to a queue. If, for whatever reason it can't send the order (this could be the retailer platform going down but also an integration breakage) Two Tap doesn't give up. It raises an internal ticket and a human investigates the issue. In our experience, tickets are rare, and in 90% of these issue cases it literally means waiting for 5 to 15 minutes until the merchant website becomes available again.

For instance, Two Tap powers international checkout on a top 5 US retailer (and many others) through one of our clients. That third party accepts international orders and sends them to the merchants’ US website through Two Tap. During Black Friday 2015 that retailer’s main website was down for a couple of hours, and for the rest of day had a waiting queue for any purchase where shoppers would have to repeatedly hit add to cart until the store said “OK you can purchase the product”.

Any international order sent through Two Tap went through just fine. That is because Two Tap accepted orders and tried to place them until the website was back online, and then until the queue issue was resolved.

By that metric, sending an order to Two Tap is more reliable than trying to place that order with retailer platforms themselves.

What happens when a retailer changes code.

That being said, integrations do break. Here is how Two Tap doesn't lose any orders.

The merchant support team

Two Tap has a merchant support team that adds and maintains stores. Someone is always on call monitoring the integrations.

Because of the way Two Tap was designed nobody writes scrapers. Think of adding stores as Excel Macros, the team fills out certain fields with information. We are able to take a person with zero coding knowledge and have them add/maintain stores in two weeks. Our merchant support team’s background is in cooking, call center support, farming and more.

By far our biggest accomplishment has been that a large part of our merchant support team has learned to code. They started small with a tiny bit of Javascript to fix an issue on a site, and after a while they move on to contribute code to our backend.

Automated Daily tests

All 1200+ retailers are tested daily. When something breaks our 24/7 on call teams gets an alert.

About 4% of our websites have one tiny change a month, with 1% changing completely. The tiny changes are resolved in under 5 minutes.

Our daily tests are designed to not affect retailers stores, and we never hit the final 'place order' button.

Automated Weekly tests

Once a week we thoroughly test all the integrations. We run multiple tests (guest checkout, authenticated checkout, pickup from store) and we go all the way to make sure everything is fine.

Tickets

Let's say a website changes between a daily/weekly test. If something breaks, instead of giving up, the oncall team receives a ticket and investigates what's happening. Once the issue has been resolved the purchase can be retried and the order confirmed.

Highly paranoid Two Tap

It was obvious early on that reliability is our number one priority so we became paranoid about it. At Two Tap we're so careful about not losing orders that if for whatever reason our API crashes it's designed to create tickets before dying.

What else?

There's a lot of magic happening in the background. For instance product crawling is completely separate than the placing of orders. Two Tap has a rabbitmq powered phantomjs cloud that just fetches product availability in realtime. It takes into account if for some reason a website is down for a bit, and retries multiple times from different servers.

It's all about the retailers

By far, we consider Two Tap's biggest advantage the fact that retailers can focus on their core business and we'll take care of the rest.

Whatever people say about scraping (and Two Tap indirectly) the fact is that retailers love us, and consider us "as magic". Two Tap is the most reliable solution on the market and we have a guarantee that we don’t lose any customer order that can be fulfilled by a retailer partner.

We are reliable because we are highly paranoid and always assume and take into consideration the worst possible outcome. However, unlike deep integrations which depend on retailer IT departments, if something breaks, it's on Two Tap end to fix. This allows us to guarantee a level of security to our publishers.

Two Tap is now able to payout commissions from over 400 retailers, including American Eagle Outfitters, Target, BestBuy, Forever21, and more. The 400+ retailers have Two Tap accounts where you can send them messages, get coupons, learn of deals ahead of time, and more.

Everything we do is public

We can’t mention all our clients publicly due to NDAs but Two Tap has been powering order placement on 50 leading retailers for the biggest dropshipper in the world – with no orders lost in the past 18 months. They’re using Two Tap because it’s easier to manage one API integration than 50 different deep integrations with these retailers and they can be up and running in a matter of days instead of months – all with zero investment on the retailer’s side.

Two Tap is completely open about what we do, and never hide ourselves. Our docs are publicly available. As a consumer if you want to buy something right now you can go to our simple consumer interface at http://twotapit.com.

[twotap]

Publisher Spotlight: Blue Kangaroo

Products and Deals, Just for You!

"With Two Tap, Blue Kangaroo's users can complete their purchases more quickly and easily without ever leaving the site or mobile app” - Anthony Ford

It’s mid-February and that means in most parts of the country it’s Winter. Finding the perfect cold weather jacket to hit the slopes and gloves might be on the top of your shopping list. The good news is that shopping doesn’t have to be difficult or stressful. Blue Kangaroo allows you to customize your favorite deals and shopping steals all in one place to find the perfect items you have been looking for.

Blue Kangaroo is a personalized search engine for products where users are shown coupon codes and price history for certain products. Coming soon, users will be able to receive price drop alerts on certain products to their desired price. When interacting on the site, users will be shown live product feeds of what users are shopping for in real-time. Truly, a interactive experience for the online shopper. Think of it as your own personal shopper, enabling you to explore and find offers, deals and discount coupons. Blue Kangaroo delivers to its users the right offer at the right time all in a single platform. Blue Kangaroo maintains a roster of over 3,000 retail brands and distribution partners.

Blue Kangaroo sorts daily deals for your personalized interests. No more cluttered email inboxes. Consumers go in and select the brands and categories they are interested in receiving offers from and the Blue Kangaroo recommendation engine serves up relevant content information.

Read on to learn more about how Blue Kangaroo implemented Two Tap to deliver a seamless checkout experience for its users.

Please describe your company

Blue Kangaroo is a social shopping service that provides shopping recommendations to its users via its website, mobile apps, and browser extensions. Its website and mobile apps show users what people like them are shopping for right now based on their shopping preferences. Its services also include price history, price drop alerts, price comparison, coupon codes, wish lists, and various social shopping features. Through its apps and browser extensions, Blue Kangaroo alerts users to deals while they are shopping and can keep track of their entire shopping history for them. Shopping histories of over 6 million users are the core of Blue Kangaroo’s powerful deals and product recommendation service.

Who is using your product?

Blue Kangaroo is used by online shoppers of all ages. Users can find all their favorite stores and discover new ones they’ll love. Anyone who shops at Kohl’s, Amazon, GameStop, Victoria’s Secret, Petco, and over 3,000 other online stores can get personalized products and deals.

What do users love about your product?

Blue Kangaroo users can do all their shopping in one place while getting personalized product and deal recommendations. They add products from all over the web to their wish lists and get notified when an item they want is on sale or when coupons are available at their favorite stores.

What were the challenges you faced prior to Two Tap?

Prior to Two Tap, Blue Kangaroo did not have its own checkout, and users had to leave the site or mobile app to complete their purchase at the merchant's websites. With Two Tap users are able to complete their purchase directly within the session without being re-directed.

How did using Two Tap change the way your users interact with your app?

With Two Tap, Blue Kangaroo's users can complete their purchases more quickly and easily without ever leaving the site or mobile app, and they can use Blue Kangaroo's coupon codes in the Two Tap checkout. Users who save their shipping and billing information get an even speedier checkout.

We welcome Blue Kangaroo to Two Tap!

Download Blue Kangaroo for Android

Download Blue Kangaroo for iOS

Join the conversation and Follow Two Tap on Twittter

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Publisher Spotlight: Bloglovin'

Shop the latest looks from the top fashion bloggers!

“I already have the Bloglovin' blog app, and this app is perfect to make those travel clothes easier to find! Love this app!”. - Customer Review

Looking for the perfect date night outfit? Need some VDay inspiration? Thinking about new sandals for the beach? Discover the latest fashion trends and connect with influencers from all around the world based on your interests and tastes on Bloglovin'. Founded in 2007, Bloglovin allows you to follow your favorite blogs and discover new ones all in one place within a beautiful interface.

With over 8 million active users and 750,000 registered bloggers, Bloglovin’ is the ultimate destination for fashion, beauty and lifestyle-obsessed users to discover, consume and share professionally produced content from top influencers around the world. The Bloglovin’ Shop app is an extension of the Bloglovin’ brand dedicated to mobile commerce by providing influencers with the ability to make their blog posts shoppable. Shop items from brands such as TopShop, ASOS, Net-a-Porter and many others.

Discover and Start Shopping

By implementing the Two Tap Cart, users of the Bloglovin’ Shop app have the ability to buy items directly inside the app from top content creators and influencers individual sites in real-time, allowing for truly inspired shopping 24/7.

With a unified feature set and single API, Bloglovin’ Shop was able to implement and deliver a seamless checkout experience for its users by using Two Tap.

Join Bloglovin’ Today

Become a Bloglovin’ Shop member today and start following your favorite blogs for your own personalized interest based experience. Start loving your favorite products and save the looks that inspire you.

Download the Bloglovin’ Shop app and start shopping the latest looks from top fashion bloggers!

Join the conversation and Follow Two Tap on Twittter

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TrendBrew Accelerates Time to Market and Scales to 4,000+ Retailers Using Two Tap and Indix

Build or Integrate?

When TrendBrew decided to embark on a journey to create “A Social Trending Network” for e-commerce, food, sports, media and entertainment, they had a decision to make. Would they build their product data and checkout infrastructure themselves, or would they partner with other companies to do it?

TrendBrew didn’t have a small vision. Their vision was to deliver a network where influencers and shoppers could identify and purchase top trending products from 100s of retailers at a one-stop shop.

TrendBrew planned to build a trending network that had multiple offers for each product, that would aggregate and link blogs and videos to specific products, and that would allow shoppers to easily earn rewards. They needed a lot of selection and simplicity—the ease of socially buzzing with a single click and a seamless checkout experience was critical.

Speed Matters

“We considered developing the capabilities in-house, but we quickly realized that meeting aggressive time-to-market deadlines and scaling up retailers would be challenging,” said Shirish Arashanapalli, Founder and CEO of TrendBrew. “Speed was absolutely critical.”

TrendBrew wanted to launch in less than a year, and needed to design, build the platform, form affiliate partnerships, and launch. After careful evaluation, TrendBrew selected Indix to provide product information and offers and Two Tap to enable a seamless checkout experience via its light-weight universal shopping cart technology.

Scaling Fast

TrendBrew soft launched in the first week of September 2015 with over 1.2Million page views and 400K product views in the first three months. Inbound traffic included bloggers, stylists, fashion designers, shoppers, and online boutiques from USA, UK, Canada, Brazil and India—exactly the audience they were trying to reach.

By integrating Indix for product information and the Two Tap universal shopping cart TrendBrew was able to focus their efforts on product design and building partnerships. TrendBrew is an affiliate partner of 160 retailers and brands, including Amazon, Macy’s, Nordstrom, Sephora, Timex, Nike, and several others.

“With Indix, we retrieve product information across thousands of retailers with just one simple API call. This allowed us to scale up to over 4,000 retailers almost immediately,” said Arashanapalli. “Two Tap allows our users to seamlessly add items and go through the checkout process in the most frictionless way without leaving our site. We also love Two Tap’s real-time product availability check, which means that our users check out with accurate pricing and in- stock information.”

Using Indix product information and the Two Tap lightweight shopping cart allowed TrendBrew to launch a beautiful, fun social commerce network in only a few months. TrendBrew is now looking forward to scaling to millions of users with Two Tap and Indix.

About TrendBrew

TrendBrew is a social commerce network connecting shoppers and influencers (Bloggers, Vloggers, Stylists, Fashion Designers, etc.) in an ecosystem consisting of retailers, brands, boutiques and card networks.TrendBrew’s unique network aggregates top trending products from over 4,000 retailers. It provides multiple offers for each product and price comparison, and users earn rewards for every purchase. Users can also “Wish My Price” or populate “My Timeline” and get personalized offers.

Get started today with your very own Trendbrew account and start earning rewards through personalized offers and saving money.

Follow @trendbrew

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Publisher Spotlight: Muse

Connect with your favorite brands and tastemakers from your lock screen

"Two Tap is doing for ecommerce what AWS did for IT” - Founder of Muse, Andrea Riposati

What if you could buy products from the lock screen of your phone? With Muse you can. Muse is the first app that allows product discovery and shopping from the lock screen. Very cool, we must say! We are proud to showcase Muse one of our publishers part of the Two Tap Gateway.

How does Muse work?

Right on the lock screen, start discovering content through the Muse carousel. You can follow Muse publishers, select channels and explore curated topics. Your lock screen becomes more personalized and relevant by learning tastes and your style, from interaction. The lock screen carousel of images allows shopping at your fingertips without unlocking the lock screen. There are over 2,000+ stores on Muse, including: Barney's, Shoptiques, Art.com, Gucci, Home Depot and many more.

Tap to Purchase

Discover products on the lock screen and when a product is spotted and desired to be purchased, simply "Tap" to purchase. This opens up the Two Tap Cart where the user is guides through a seamless checkout experience.

Spotlight Session:

We sat down with the founder of Muse, Andrea Riposati to learn more about what went into the development of Muse and why they implemented Two Tap for the checkout process.

Please describe your company.

Muse is a leading app to shop from your favorite tastemakers - right on the lock screen. Muse showcases a carousel of curated stories by the world's best tastemakers on the lock screen and enables users to shop the specific items purchased by those tastemakers.

Who is using your product?

70% of our users are sophisticated women with higher education, who follow tastemakers on social media and are very grateful to have a single platform that bridges the gap between content and ecommerce.

What do users love about your product?

Users really love how easy and beautiful it to shop from our stories. Users love our design, the easy-to-use interface and the beautiful content.

What were the challeges faced prior to implementing Two Tap?

First, prior to Two Tap, we had to form partnerships with every single store we worked with. That was a time-consuming effort, that drained resources from other activities. Second, we had to maintain and update our own checkout system. Now, we rely on a trusted partner to expand the list of retailers we can work with. We are truly amazed by Two Tap's impressive ability to scale the number of retailers. We don't have to worry about cart and checkout - as Two Tap keeps releasing new amazing features every month. Two Tap is doing for ecommerce what AWS did for IT.

How did using Two Tap change the way your users interact with your app?

Using Two Tap has multiplied the opportunities by 100x. With Two Tap, Muse users access products from 2,000+ leading online stores. Before, we only had a limited selection of products. Thanks to Two Tap impressive store growth (+150% in less than a year), now we can feature thousands of new products. Muse stories have become much more meaningful while users loved the introduction of Two Tap.

Welcome Muse and download the Muse App on Google Play here.

Join the Conversation The Two Tap Publisher Spotlight series showcases our publisher partners and how they are using Two Tap. To nominate a publisher to be featured, tweet to @TwoTapBuy

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American Eagle Outfitters Joins Two Tap Gateway

Two Tap is proud to welcome American Eagle Outfitters to the Two Tap Gateway.

American Eagle Outfitters is one of the leading teenage fashion retailers selling on-trend clothing and accessories. American Eagle Outfitters is part of the CJ Affiliate program and recently won the New Advertiser of the Year award at the recent CJU event in Santa Barbara.

“We are really excited about working with the TwoTap team to identify ways to not only enhance the check-out experience, but to reduce bounce rates, increase product sales & improve overall program performance & publisher commissions through higher conversion rates” - Alyson Raymond, Affiliate Marketing Manager with CJ Affiliate by Conversant

We had the opportunity to sit down with members of the American Eagle Outfitters team to learn more about their business. Here is what they had to say:

Advertiser Spotlight: American Eagle Outfitters

What can you tell us about American Eagle Outfitters?

We are a specialty retailer offering high quality, on trend clothing & accessories at affordable prices, targeting the 15-25 year old shopper. We work to craft our clothing to fit everyone’s individual style & we pride ourselves in being America’s favorite denim brand. Aerie for American Eagle Outfitters is also part of the AEO family, offering naturally sexy lingerie for the girl next door; bras, undies & more that are all made with love & attention to even the smallest detail.

What kinds of publisher partners is American Eagle Outfitters looking to work with?

Our goal is to expand brand awareness & grow our customer acquisition. We want to tailor to each customer’s need whether it be through cash back, price comparison, donations to a favorite cause, coupons, or content. We would love to partner with publishers of all sizes who are interested in promoting the American Eagle Outfitters brand in exchange for a revenue share. If you are interested in joining the AEO affiliate program, you can sign up via the link below, or you can reach out to americaneagleoutfitters@cj.com with any questions!

Note: More details on joining the American Eagle Outfitters affiliate campaign at the end of this post.

What are some hot selling items right now?

Our product focus for holiday is around sweaters, sweater dresses, cold weather accessories, plaid, outerwear & denim. We offer a gifting section that includes our holiday favorites & gifts by price to enhance the customer shopping experience as our customers are looking for specific items to give & get for the holiday season.

How to Work with American Eagle Outfitters on Two Tap

Grow your business and generate income from promoting products from American Eagle Outfitters today. Start earning a commission for completed orders sold and sent through the Two Tap Gateway and boost your online business. Choose the model that is best suited for your business.

Model 1: If you are a publisher already part of the CJ Affiliate network, your existing affiliate ID will work within the CJ Affiliate platform. Use this link to sign up to the American Eagle Outfitters campaign on CJ Affiliate.

Contact Two Tap to learn more about integrating our tools for increased conversion and enabling a seamless checkout experience.

Model 2: If you are just starting to promote American Eagle Outfitters products, Two Tap can handle all payment terms. You will get paid directly a commission by Two Tap for completed orders sent through the Two Tap Gateway.

Requirement: In both models, we require that all publishers Create An Account on Two Tap. By creating an account on Two Tap, publishers have the ability to access granular sales data.

Join the program and spread the news by sharing with your fellow publisher community friends.

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Product Update: Supporting Site-Wide Coupons

The power of influence in driving shopping behavior and decisions is real. Information is powerful. When you know more you are equipped differently (good or bad) to make a decision. Since launching Two Tap in 2013, we continue to work towards delivering on our mission to “Provide the most intelligent set of API tools enabling eCommerce to happen everywhere”. We believe in enabling access to information when needed most - and in our business it is at the intention point in the purchase funnel.

Delivering on our mission began with one of our core features, the real-time product availability API that delivers an accurate shopping experience to the consumer by displaying only the products and specific product attributes that are in stock. From there we continued to improve our tools by estimating shipping and sales tax within the checkout experience.

We continued product development by adding the ability to display different product galleries for different product colors. That led to adding support for complete product descriptions and displaying retailer return policies. Supporting our mission to deliver on equipping consumers with information they need to make personalized shopping experiences, we added the ability for the consumer to pick a shipping option (cheapest or fastest) directly inside the Two Tap Cart.

At this point all of these features are readily available to thousands of retailers, without requiring any kind of integration. We were missing coupons though.

Coupons are an influence tool that retailers often use to push a consumer from initial interest to a completed purchase. They also have a large influence on increasing loyalty. Coupons also have the power to make the consumer feel happier with their shopping decision knowing they they were able to apply a coupon and take advantage of a great deal.

While coupon support was always baked into Two Tap, we had no way of knowing if a coupon is valid, and if it was, for what value. When someone added a coupon inside the Two Tap Cart we would have to ask the shopper to confirm the order once we knew if the coupon was valid or not. Not the best experience.

Introducing network-wide coupon support

We're happy to announce that estimating site-wide coupons directly inside the Two Tap Cart is now live. Starting today, if a store has a coupon for "50% off any order of $150 or more” for example, Two Tap will show and accurately display that discount directly inside all shopping carts.

While Two Tap can not estimate product/category specific coupons, we've improved our existing infrastructure to return a descriptive label.

If you have currently integrated the Two Tap Cart, the good news is you don’t have to do anything to activate this feature. Coupon estimation has been enabled in the background.

If you are using the API we've updated our cart/estimates docs here: http://docs.twotap.com/docs/cart-estimates

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Publisher Spotlight: Miner

We are proud to highlight Miner, one of our many publisher partners here at Two Tap.

Miner is a leading online shopping app that makes buying clothes easier than ever. Miner provides access to the latest styles and sales from your favorite stores, all in one beautiful iPhone app. The Miner team is committed to creating the gold standard for mobile shopping.

Prior to using Two Tap, Miner did not have a checkout process in place. By integrating Two Tap, Miner has been able to deliver a seamless checkout experience for all of their users.

Implementing the Two Tap Cart has enabled Miner to deliver:

Universal checkout across their supported retailer stores. Shoppers can buy items from various stores all in one place without leaving their app.

Billing and shipping information is entered once by the shopper. This allows a more hassle-free checkout experience.

Real-time product information and availability to the shopper. This gives shoppers the peace of mind that orders are 100% accurate.

Users of Miner are fashion forward millennials looking to search for items across a variety of retailers in one app experience. Miner featues brands such as Forever 21, H&M, Banana Republic, Free People, J Brand, Saks, Bloomingdales and many more.

We welcome Miner to the Two Tap Network!

Download the Miner app here

Interested in becoming a publisher? Learn more here

Join the Conversation The Two Tap Publisher Spotlight series showcases our publisher partners and how they are using Two Tap. To nominate a publisher to be featured, tweet to @TwoTapBuy

For the latest Two Tap news and updates, follow us @TwoTapBuy or connect on LinkedIn

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Announcement: CJ Affiliate Partners with Two Tap

We are proud to announce our partnership today with CJ Affiliate during their annual CJU conference in Santa Barbara. Two Tap is revolutionizing eCommerce by delivering a universal checkout technology that allows consumers to seamlessly transact everywhere.

"This partnership allows marketers to redefine their online shopping experience,” said Executive Vice President of Customer Experience, Lisa Riolo. “The days of researching products on one site and having to purchase them on another are over."

CJ Affiliate by Conversant selected Two Tap as its exclusive technology supplier to power seamless checkout experiences across its network of publishers and retailers. After evaluating other options in the market, CJ Affiliate chose Two Tap for a number of reasons including our scale and adoption thus far, our proprietary Pass-Through Model and our real-time product availability API that checks if a product is in stock before an order is placed.

"Redefining how shoppers transact online has been our sole focus from day one, and I’m thrilled that CJ Affiliate has chosen us to enable this across their entire network,” said CEO of Two Tap, Razvan Roman. “Two Tap is the first and only one to offer this capability and we believe it will forever change the way we shop online.”

Start activating your in-app buy button and commerce API with CJ Affiliate by Conversant, powered by Two Tap. Free sign-up and no integration required.

Retailers love Two Tap as we have made getting started simple. No integration required. No infrastructure maintenance required. Just sign up and start approving channels to sell to. Are you a retailer? Learn more and sign up today

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Say Goodbye to Abandoned Shopping Carts for Good

Today's digital consumer is connected like never before. On any given minute, they are interacting on multiple devices and showing intent by clicking, sharing and posting. For retailers, this presents both an opportunity and challenge, especially considering most shoppers now spend most of their time in discovery apps.

The greatest “currency” for a retailer other than completed transactions is loyalty to their brand. If false information such as the availability of a product is mis-communicated, or shipping information is incorrect this causes incredible frustration to the consumer. The last thing you want is to have a product become popular and then out of stock after shoppers get excited. Unfortunately, this happens all the time.

eMarketer reports that Retail accounts for 22% of digital ad spend. The largest percentage followed by automotive, financial services and telecom.

Why waste valuable ad spend dollars on delivering false digital experiences for your consumer? If part of the product information is missing or incorrect not only are you wasting dollars, but are left with a pool of customers that will most likely associate negative experiences with your store brand.

If you are a retailer it’s time to realize that shoppers are interacting with your products outside of your e-commerce platform most of the time. Not being able to deliver relevant and trustworthy information about these products, and most importantly real-time availability is a bad experience to shoppers, especially if they became excited before trying to buy. You can no longer afford to let your customers down.

Here is a classic scenario:

Consumer spots the perfect pair of blue shoes for the big day in an app. Score! Wait, what? the product is unavailable? Bummer!

Challenge Retailers need to reach their consumer at the right time, on the right device, the right channel AND with real-time product information. Retailers can no longer afford to lose valuable transactions due to unreliable product information and often at times simply the connection of information being broken.

Solution Suggest to your partners, publishers, affiliates and app developers to start using the Two Tap API that delivers real-time info on the products added to a cart by shoppers. By having real-time information about products app developers can always build the best experience and make sure that the shoppers are always in the know about products.

By using Two Tap’s API publishers and retailers alike can forget synching product catalogs or 3rd Party Order Management systems.

Source: eMarketer US Digital Ad Spending Share by Industry 2015 March 2015

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What the Pinterest “Buy” button means for E-Commerce

Retailers are starting to experiment with adding the ability for consumers to buy products directly in app sessions from an array of partner ecosystems. The announcement from Pinterest is incredibly positive and validating for the entire e-commerce industry. At the same time it also raises questions for the retailer. It’s a great time to explore some of these questions and concerns as they relate to pushing mobile e-commerce forward.

First: The consumer wins. Allowing consumers to buy at the point of discovery is a huge time saver and conversion rates always follow. While in the path of discovery, a product is identified and the consumer wants to, and now is able to, complete the purchase immediately.

Next: The app developer ecosystem wins. A great amount of focus and app development is being spent building unique and inspiring experiences that capture the consumer’s intent. The e-commerce space is evolving and recent news shows that retailers are adapting while allowing select app developers to facilitate purchasing directly on their platforms.

Some of the challenges that app developers are actively addressing are:

Correct Purchase Attribution — affiliate platforms limit performance, especially on mobile platforms where the old cookie attribution system is not working properly

A consistent API that gives access to all retailers full inventory.Instead of looking to integrate individual retailer APIs, all app developers require a single stop service provider that has reliable stock information and can safely and reliably place an order for ANY product within the retailer’s inventory.

Real-time inventory data — essential for shoppers.

Analytics layer with granular sales data that can be used to build intelligent consumer facing experiences.

Lastly retailers who source and merchandise products have real concerns about who can have access to sell their inventory remotely. Some aspects of the interaction are essential:

Clearly identifying who sells the product by fully displaying the product info, price, availability, retailer logo, return policy and anything else related to buying such a product.

Automatically receiving an order in their backend system so they can make deliveries as per usual.

Ability to send the same standard confirmation email to a shopper so they clearly know where they’re transacting from.

Privacy and security assurances as they relate to the shopper’s data

Analytics layer and full control over who gets access to selling their inventory

Clear sales reporting with 100% accurate sales attribution

The Two Tap team applauds the emerging forward progress. As detailed in Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends report, e-commerce counts for 9% of Retail Sales. This percentage has doubled over the past ten years and only continues to grow rapidly.

The rise of mobile devices has caused fragmentation of online shopping consumption. It is our job, as an industry, to address the rapid shift in consumer habits while keeping the consumer engaged on the right device and at the right time.

Two Tap is addressing these challenges head on by delivering:

Scale – Two Tap has over 800+ supported retailer integrations with over 1000 publisher relationships enabling access to hundreds of millions of products from the largest retailers. Two Tap currently serves millions of products monthly through our distribution network.

Universality – Two Tap’s universal shopping cart allows visitors to automatically buy any product from any retailer on any device, app or website by delivering the most advanced product availability API. Two Taps universal shopping cart works on any platform 24/7.

Retailer Control – The order payment, fulfillment and confirmation are managed by our retailer partners allowing the control and transparency to remain with the retailer.

Reliability – Two Tap delivers real-time product availability information before any order is started.

Security - PCI DSS certification ensures the highest level security and is coupled with a retailer's existing fraud mechanisms.

Exciting times are ahead and The Two Tap team continues to believe in delivering:

A universal checkout for the entire Web

Extending and simplifying online shopping experiences everywhere

Making transactions easy and secure

Creating seamless shopping experiences

Are you a retailer looking to extend your reach in 3rd party apps?

Are you a affiliate looking to increase your conversion rates?

Get in touch!

We’re excited to share exciting news ahead, so stay tuned!

Follow us @TwoTapBuy

Happy Shopping

The Two Tap Team

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Quicky: Amazon’s Dash Replenishment Service in 4 lines of code for any retailer

In case you haven't read about it yet, Amazon launched a tiny button that orders stuff (like consumables) automatically when you press it. It's called Amazon Dash. They also announced a program for partners called Amazon Dash Replenishment Service where device makers can embed buttons for easy replenishment of consumables.

Here at the Two Tap tech department we feel this is an amazing step forward and we are look forward to bowing down to our washing machines overlords.

But as we were reading the docs we were disappointed by a couple of things: you need to have the amazon app installed, you have to be a prime member, and it takes TEN lines of code to integrate it.

Another big issue is automatic ordering with one tap. There’s no confirm step! We remember being kids and having the temptation of a shiny button just sitting there, staring at us, begging us to click it. Surely there has to be a better way.

Introducing Quicky

Quicky is needlessy reinventing the inexistent device replenishment market. We have managed to boil everything down to a total of FOUR lines of code. Which already makes it 60% better.

How to use Quicky

First you make a call to quicky.

curl "https://api.twotap.com/v1.0/quicky?\ public_token=$PUBLIC_TOKEN&\ phone=$PHONE&\ message=$MESSAGE&\ sms_confirm_url=$SMS_CONFIRM_URL&\ products=$PRODUCTS"

Then you implement the sms_confirm_url on your end which can take as little as three lines of code. The implementation could probably be finished in a couple of minutes.

How Quicky works

Quicky will send a text message to the shopper's phone with a link to start the checkout process. With one tap it opens a checkout interface inside Safari. Shoppers have to enter their data the first time (yeah, we know), and for all future orders they will only have to enter their CVV.

Now, you might think that entering the CVV every time is a hassle, but we feel this confirmation step is actually how it should work. Leaving aside 'what does this button do' temptations, once printers become sentient this feature is going to save humanity.

How to implement Quicky

Quicky is live, and you can starting using it NOW. The full docs are here, you can use it with any product from our 650+ supported stores. It works on any phone with a modern browser and requires no app installation.

Test out Quicky below. We've prefilled a product but you need to enter your phone number.

      Test Quicky

function testQuicky() { console.log('aici'); var quickyPath = 'https://api.twotap.com/v1.0/quicky'; var productURL = document.querySelector('#quicky_product_url').value; var phone = document.querySelector('#quicky_phone').value; if (!productURL || productURL.length == 0 || !phone || phone.length == 0) { alert("Please enter a product URL and a phone number"); return; } quickyPath += "?public_token=6ad2af4e0e1e2fb08de9&sms_confirm_url=https://core.twotap.com/workers/proposed_recipes/sms_confirm_url_2"; quickyPath += "&phone=" + phone; quickyPath += "&products=" + productURL; console.log(quickyPath); ajax.get(quickyPath, {}, function(data) { data = JSON.parse(data); if (data['message'] == 'done') { alert('Message sent!'); } else { alert("Couldn't send the message. Are you sure you entered everything OK?"); } }); return false; } var el = document.querySelector('#test_quicky'); el.onclick = testQuicky;

Long live our future overlords, 'Purple Paper Eater' and 'Washee washee'.

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Product descriptions and returns now available

Two new and important features are now available through the Two Tap API.

Return information and product description are very important pieces of information that can sway a shopper one way or the other when considering placing an order. Both are now available for any product throughout Two Tap's supported stores.

The features are also included in Two Tap's shopping cart. The details button displays the relevant info to the shopper:

The details popup directly in the cart: