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Dynamic Settings

The ValueChecker service is country specific and has many customization and flexible business options making the service client specific.
It is important to build your implementation with this in mind. Settings and access tokens (which are minted per client) should be easy to change in value and between different clients who may be using the same software implementation.
Passing correct query variables with the wrong token will gain you access to the API response but it will be empty in most cases. Please take care in managing the tokens and corresponding settings and configurations.

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Client Features

There are a number of features that are available to tailor the ValueChecker API response and results to your needs. Most of these will be set by your ValueChecker representative, but the following settings can be requested to be toggled ON/OFF:

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Filtered Prices

Filtered prices are removed from the RP response.

Default is TRUE

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Category Correction

Requested categories are analyzed using prediction and switched when better results can be found in the CP response.

Default is TRUE

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Clustered Prices

Prices in non-core categories are aggregated into price buckets and returned in the CP response.

Default is TRUE

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Category Metadata

Category information is returned in the CP response as a metadata object.

Default is TRUE for new clients. FALSE for existing clients until they migrate.

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Client Categories

One of ValueCheckers strengths is its ability to adapt to many types of category configurations.
Some clients may use 2 categories of Telephones and Tablets while others may introduce a third middle range screen size as Phablets between the 2.
To adapt to this, we maintain a separate category taxonomy for each client. Categories are represented by an alphanumeric string (client_category) i.e. “Mobile phones” and a corresponding integer category identifier (client_category_id) i.e. 12345.

To use the ValueChecker API you can pass either the client_category (recommended) or the client_category_id. E.g, if the client category “Tablets” has a client category id 123, then it will be equivalent to send a request using either client_category_id=123 or client_category=tablets.

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client_category usage

Pass the category to both the Claimed Product and Replacement Product endpoints as a formatted string.

  • The string is not case-sensitive.
  • Special alphabetic characters like “ø” are converted to their ASCII equivalent, in this case “o”.
  • Spaces and other special characters like “&” and “/” are disregarded, so the following examples are equivalent: _ “Audio / Video” and “Audio & Video” _ “Midi/Minisets” and “Midi / Minisets” _ “Make-Up - Aangebroken” and “Make-Up (Aangebroken)” _ “Airconditioning (mobiel)” and “Airconditioning - Mobiel”

This method also holds the following advantage: any client category that does not have a mapping (client_category_id) will be automatically processed. There is no need to wait until the client_category_id is issued, making the implementation process simpler and faster.

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How this works:

  1. You use a client_category that has never been passed to the ValueChecker API before: Example: “Android Tablets”.
  2. The API identifies it as a new category and creates a new mapping for this category using smart analysis (the extracted word “Tablets” is equal to our core category “Tablets”). * If for some reason a mapping cannot be automatically assigned, the request will continue in the generic category of “All Other Products” until our QA team can manually ascertain the mapping.
  3. That mapping (your category of “Android Tablets” to our core category “Tablets”) gets a client_category_id (i.e. 123) and is available in the next request to the Client Categories endpoint.
  4. You can then continue using the client_category or the client_category_id for future requests to this category.

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client_category_id usage

To use the ValueChecker API with the identifier you must always pass your client_category_id along with the request query to both the Claimed Product and Replacement Product endpoints.

It is absolutely required that these values are correct. Passing an incorrect or outdated client_category_id will yield no results!

We provide a Client Categories endpoint where you can fetch these values on demand to store them in a dynamic manner. These identifiers do not change often, but it is good practice to keep them regularly updated in an automated way.

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All Other Products

We maintain a generic category named “All Other Products”. It may be called a different name according to your locale. You can find it in the Client Categories endpoint.
We recommend if you do not know the category in a particular search to omit sending any category information as our category prediction will find the best result based on analysis of the search string.
If you are not able to omit the category parameter, we recommend the user be able to enter the category as best as they can describe it using the client_category (string) parameter.
In the last resort cases you may use this category for any searches where you are not sure of the category or cannot find a suitable category or do not wish to allow the user to define their category.

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Session Identifiers

A session identifier is a unique string passed as a parameter in certain requests that can be used by ValueChecker to aggregate actions by a single end user (i.e. a user of your integration).
This string can be:

  • a hashed value of a username or account id from your integration.
  • an application or framework assigned session id.
  • any other uniquely generated string - per end user. We use this identifier in our system health checks, anonymized usage analysis, and to help detect anomalies in your integration.

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Multi-Client Users (MCU)

If a user account is MCU enabled, you may use that user accounts API key to call data for any client that the user has permission to access.

  • Use the parameter client_id to specify which client you are requesting data from.
  • If you request a client that you do not have access to, you will receive an error response.
  • If your user is MCU enabled, the client_id is a required parameter on most endpoints. It is good practise to include the client_id in all your requests by default so that you do not need to make code change when enabling/disabling MCU.
  • If you send the parameter client_id when not MCU enabled, it is ignored with a 200 response.
  • If your user should be MCU enabled but is not, please contact support@valuechecker.ai