Web Services

The developing area of web services offers many new opportunities for connecting businesses together digitally.

What are Web Services?

Web services are standards compliant method of exchanging data, seamlessly incorporating electronic services from your business partners. You can also provide an interface by which others can access your business data.

Who is using Web Services?

One of the most widely used examples is Amazon Web Services. It allows websites to incorporate the Amazon product database in their own sites programtically. You can control the presentation of the data, Amazon web services simply provides a way of querying their product database from with in your site and returning the result of your request.

Other widely used web services are:

• eBay
  With eBay web services it's possible to search, bid and create auction listings automatically. For example if you're running an online shop and you wish to automatically list your products on eBay without having to input them manually then web services are your answer.

• PayPal
  The PayPal API enables transactions to be made directly from your website.

• FedEx
  The FedEx web services allow you to calculate shipping costs to any location realtime so that your website can use exact prices.

• InterFax
  The web services provided by Interfax enable faxes to be send and received automatically from your website.

How does this benefit me?

If you are running online shop you could use web services to transfer your products details to price comparison sites like Kelkoo. This will bring you customers when they search online for products that uyou provide.

If you accept PayPal payments then it's possible to fully automate all the payment processes direct from your website.

If your business involves using data from external sources these can be automatically integrate into your website, such as flight, travel and news feeds.

If you are an information provided this is an excellent way of extending functionality from your websites.

What can Applixa do?

Applixa can help you integrate existing web services into your website. We can also develop your own services to offer customers, partners, etc.

We offer full advice and consultancy and we can also help with general XML feeds, such as RSS.