Grön Gåva is a Swedish e-Commerce company that focuses on organic food and health products, even before those terms were fashionable. Established 15 years ago, in northern Sweden, the company has pioneered selling such good online since the very beginning, with their first online shops in 2000. More recently, Grön Gåva also diversified its offering with products for our well-being, with books, chocolate, tea, or relaxation music.
We interviewed Andreas Söderlund, working for Grön Gåva, about their usage of APISpark in the context of their e-Commerce website.
Grön Gåva is using APISpark’s Google Sheets wrapper to collect item price lists from their suppliers, to clean and normalize the data through Google Sheets, expose this data through APISpark, for injection into their ERP system, for further price analytics.
Andreas told us that “APISpark is very user-friendly, and the price model was also the best match for us”.
Key points
- Grön Gåva automates collection of suppliers’ price lists to define new prices, thanks to APISpark and its Google Sheets wrapper
- Google Sheets offers a nice and productive UI for working with the data, while APISpark makes a Web API in a snap, for consumption in Grön Gåva’s ERP and shopping site
Details
Grön Gåva collects price lists from their suppliers from Excel spreadsheets. But manually entering and updating prices in the ERP system is very time-consuming, and not a very interesting job.
To improve the process, Grön Gåva imports Excel spreadsheets in Google Sheets, so that the data can be massaged, normalized and cleaned, thanks to App Script.
Then, thanks to APISpark, all that data is exposed through a RESTful Web API that can be consumed by other processes down the automation chain.
As Andreas puts it: “We have the best of both worlds with APISpark and its Google Sheets Wrapper: ease of accessing data with a REST API, and powerful spreadsheet UI to facilitate working with the data.”
The ERP system is able to correlate the new data from the APISpark hosted Web API, with existing price lists, by joining and comparing with supplier’s article identifiers. From this step, another spreadsheet is generated to compare current prices, new prices from suppliers, and give useful metrics and statistics to help Grön Gåva decide the new price to apply in its e-Commerce shopping site. After a final review of those prices, they can be uploaded to the ERP and displayed on the site.
On the usage of the spreadsheet in this scenario, Andreas expressed that: “A spreadsheet is a very good mental model for humans, so providing the data in Google Sheets while simultaneously exposing that data through a REST Web API is wonderful. Then having it integrated in the Google Apps suite for scripting, collaboration, and portability, is another big advantage.
Key benefits
- APISpark and its Google Sheets wrapper greatly simplify the tasks of ingesting supplier’s price lists into their ERP and shopping website, reducing long hours of tedious work into an automated process, where humans can focus on the pricing aspects rather than on the boring manual steps.
Advantages
- APISpark Google Sheets wrapper facilitates human work with the data with a powerful UI through Google Sheets, whereas the wrapper allows to expose a Web API to programmatic consumption
- The freemium model is generous to get started with the APISpark platform