With the explosion of specialized, “cloud”-based service providers, odds are good that your company is using them to handle some of the more tedious or complicated aspects or your online store. Most of the newer startups have an API available to hook into for data synchronization. From my very early days of working with osCommerce, I’ve been tasked create custom code to communicate with many different types of APIs. SOAP, WSDL, XML, delimited data, are just a few examples, but these days we’re mostly working with JSON responses from providers.