What Are the Benefits of a Locations API in E-commerce (With Examples)

Identifying the location of website visitors and customers helps businesses in various ways. For instance, businesses can display content on their websites in different languages for visitors from different regions or countries to improve user experience. Moreover, with the increasing trend and benefits of location-based marketing, it's more important than ever for businesses to determine the location of potential customers. Especially for e-commerce companies, location data can make or break their business. An efficient and reliable way to determine customers' locations is by using a geolocation web API or locations API. Read on to learn how a locations API can prove to be one of the most powerful tools for your e-commerce business.

What Is A Locations API?

A locations API or geolocation API is an application programming interface that allows users to identify the location of an electronic device connected to the internet, such as a smartphone, smartwatch, laptop, tablet, desktop PC, etc. The API determines the device's location based on its IP address. An IP (Internet Protocol) address refers to a unique identifier or number assigned to every electronic device connected to the internet or a private network. It essentially helps identify electronic devices on the internet.

The response of a geolocation API typically includes API parameters like city, country, region, latitude, and longitude. Some advanced APIs also provide additional information like time zone, postal code, and currency of the returned location.

Hence, you can use a locations API to determine the location of your website visitors or consumers. However, it's essential to know that a geolocation API doesn't provide the physical addresses of users. Rather, it returns the location of the device they're using to access your e-commerce website or web app. For instance, if a user accesses your web app or website from their smartphone while sitting in their friend's house, the geolocation API will return the location of the friend's house instead of the place where the user lives.

What are the Benefits of a Locations API For E-Commerce Businesses?

Here are the key benefits of using a geolocation API for your e-commerce business:

Personalized Content

When you collect location data of website users/customers using a geolocation API, you can customize your website's content based on that data to deliver a personalized experience. For example, you can show product prices in different currencies to different users based on their location. Similarly, you can display starting and ending times of events, such as sales and deals, based on the user's location. Moreover, you can show your website content in various languages based on the users' location ID.

Location-Based Targeted Marketing

Location-based marketing involves promoting your products or services to existing and potential customers based on their geographic location. By collecting customers' real-time location data, e-commerce businesses can conduct regional analysis and run efficient location-based ad campaigns. For instance, they can send personalized messages based on the user's location. Moreover, e-commerce businesses can come up with regional-specific offers and deals. Geolocation data also helps companies decide the best times for deals and displaying ads.

Additionally, with location-based marketing, you can save costs and time by excluding customers based outside specific locations.

Enhanced User Experience and Better Conversion Rate

When you show users personalized content on your website and create personalized marketing content based on customers' locations, it significantly enhances user experience. This, in turn, improves the conversion rate, which is the ultimate goal of every e-commerce business.

Business Analytics

In today's data-driven business world, there is no denying that business analytics plays a crucial role in the success of a business. It enables companies to make informed future decisions based on the data they collect from various sources. Hence, using a geolocations API, you can collect valuable location data and feed it to your business analytics solution to identify trends, behavioral patterns, etc.

Fraud Prevention

Another benefit of using a geolocation API is fraud prevention. For example, you can use the location data provided by the API to identify users who are trying to hide their identities using proxies and VPNs. Additionally, you can match the delivery address provided by the user to the location data provided by the API to see if the user provided the correct information.

Moreover, advanced IP to Geolocation API like ipstack allows you to assess the threats and risks originating from a specific IP address and identify crawler types. This helps detect malicious activities.

Which Locations API Should You Use For Your E-Commerce Business?

One of the key things to consider while choosing a geolocation API is its accuracy. This is because inaccurate data can negatively impact your marketing campaigns and have serious financial implications. Moreover, you should also asses the features of the API.

If you're looking for a highly-accurate and advanced IP to Geolocation API, ipstack is undoubtedly the right choice. The easy-to-use REST API uses HTTP methods, such as a GET request, to deliver results in an easy-to-read JSON format. Moreover, the highly scalable API can handle thousands of requests efficiently and allows users to connect vid HTTPs for security purposes.

Here are the key features of ipstack that make it the right tool for your e-commerce business:

Highly Accurate Data

ipstack uses highly reliable data sources, such as large ISPs, to provide users with accurate and consistent location data. It covers over 2 million unique locations worldwide in over 200,000 cities worldwide and supports both IPv4 or IPv6. Moreover, the API allows users to retrieve detailed information, such as continent, country, city, region, region code, latitude and longitude coordinates, zip code, and more. If you want more detailed information, you can use other ipstack modules, such as currency, timezone, and security.

Bulk Lookup

In addition to the standard look that supports single IP address lookup, ipstack also supports bulk lookup. With this feature, you can request data for multiple IP addresses (up to 50) simultaneously.

Currency Module

With ipstack's currency module, you can request currency data of the specific location returned against the requested IP address. The API response includes the name, symbol and code of the currency. You can use this data to display product prices in the local currencies of the consumers to enhance user experience.

Security Threats

Ipstack's security module is a super helpful feature that helps protect your website from malicious activities. This feature allows you to access threats and risks originating from an IP address so you can take action on time.

Connection Module

With this module, you can get helpful information about the ASN and hostname of the ISP your users or website visitors are using.

Time Zone Module

The time zone module provides valuable time information, such as the current time and GMT offset, about the particular place/location returned against an IP address. Businesses can use this data to display starting and ending times of sales and deals in consumers' local time.

Detailed Documentation

The ipstack API has extensive documentation consisting of all the details about API capabilities, features, endpoints, methods, and parameters. Moreover, the documentation consists of coding examples in various programming languages to help you get started quickly.

Check out this article to learn how to do IP trace with ipstack.

Free Plan

ipstack offers a free plan that supports standard lookup and gives you 100 monthly API requests. You can get started with ipstack for free by getting your API key. You can subscribe to a paid plan if you want to use other API features or need more API requests.

Sign up for ipstack today and take your business to the next level!

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is a geolocation API?

A geolocation API allows users to retrieve the location data of website visitors based on their IP addresses.

Is there a free geolocation API?

ipstack geolocation API offers a free plan that gives you 100 API requests per month and provides highly accurate data.

How is geolocation data helpful for businesses?

Businesses can use the geolocation data of their website visitors for targeted advertising, location-based marketing, delivering personalized content, and fraud prevention.