Setting up an OTTO API

Before you start 

• If you are new to OTTO then you will first have to go through an onboarding / registration process. You can read more about this process here. 
• OTTO has a couple of requirements for partners interested in selling on their marketplace, which you can find here. We recommend reading these thoroughly before setting up the OTTO API. If you meet these requirements and you have registered for an OTTO Partner Connect account, we can start setting up the API!
• If you want to make use of an order connection for the OTTO marketplace, we highly recommend you read our article on how to set up an order connection for OTTO. 
• Pay attention! Our API removes all existing listings in your OTTO seller account when the API pushes for the first time.

Step 1: Setting up a connection

Once you reach 'ready to sell' in the onboarding / registration process, you will receive your API-credentials. Note that these credentials will be sent by an automated email and can not be fetched from your OTTO Partner Connect account. If you can’t find this email, please contact OTTO. 

Once you have received your credentials, go to APIs > Add new API.  A new screen will open with the API settings where you can click on the "+ Add new connection" button. 

You will be forwarded to an overview where you will see the OTTO-connection. Select this connection and fill in the Username and Password that you’ve received in the aforementioned email. 

After clicking Create, the connection will be made and you can start filling in your product information. 

Step 2: Create your product listings in Channable

Once you have created a new API exporter using the newly created connection, you can setup your product data by following the steps of the API.

1. Categories
For your product data to be created your products need a category. Add categories to your products by using the generate categories feature or create new categories from scratch.

2. Rules
Create different rules to optimize your product data. For examples take a look at our common rules support article.

3. Build
Here you can find our preset template for the product listings. All you have to do is to fill it out by clicking on the field itself and selecting what you would like to go in there. For example, the field 'Title' should display the title of your product and so on. When you have finished setting up the product listings, just click 'save' on the bottom of the screen.

Tip! Notice the question mark behind every field, if you hover over the question mark you will see the description of the field and suggestions for possible values.

Note: The product reference in the Build-step groups all variations that you want to combine into one product. This is not visible to your customers. The product reference can be freely assigned and may consist of maximum 50 characters. OTTO then recognizes which products have the same product reference and automatically makes variants out of, e.g. different sizes, colors, etc. You can define what distinguishes the variants in the attributes-step of the OTTO API in Channable.

Pay attention! After products are created, OTTO assigns a MOIN (My OTTO Integration Number) to a product. This is a unique identifier used solely on OTTO. If you upload product information for a product that already exists on OTTO, OTTO will show an error stating that the existing product information has to be used. To accept the use of this existing product information, set the field “Accept MOIN suggestion” to “True”. If you do not want to accept the product information suggested by OTTO, reach out to OTTO Partner Help.

4. Attributes
Almost done! Next up is filling in the fields in the Attributes step. Select the category you want to optimize first. An example of what should be in front of you now can be seen in the screenshot below. A more detailed explanation of what to do in the Attributes step can be found in our Attributes support article.

Step 3: Send your product data to OTTO

Your product listings are now ready to be sent. If you have not activated your project go to Settings > Project settings on the left hand side of the screen and click 'Activate project'. After, go back to the APIs tab and go to "Your OTTO API Name" > Settings where you activate the API by selecting "Activate API".

After you have completed this step, navigate back to the APIs tab and click the blue "Run now" button to start sending your product listings to OTTO.

Your products and images take at least 24 hours to be processed. If your items haven’t been processed after a couple of days, we suggest you send an email to OTTO Seller Help. 

Step 4: Solving errors

If you have sent your product listings to OTTO, go to the Preview tab of your OTTO API then set the filter to 'error' to see which product listings have errors and are not placed. Click on a specific error to see more information on what is causing the error.

Migration to OTTO API v3

Starting March 31st, 2023 OTTO will deprecate their V2 API. We have made sure that we fully support V3 before this deadline. There is only one thing you need to pay attention to after being upgraded to version 3 of the OTTO API. With the new version of the API, you will now have to submit brand IDs instead of brand names to OTTO. 

The best way to set this up is to use a search for value rule within the OTTO API setup. We recommend creating a new field brand_id to use for this. This rule could look something like this:

With this rule, you can add a list of possible brands in the left column and the corresponding brand IDs in the right column. 

To know which brand IDs to use, we have a list available for you here!

If you sell a lot of different brands, you can contact support and we can help you get all the right brand IDs. We can use the brands that you have currently filled in and create a file that contains all corresponding Brand IDs. You can then import that brand ID, or copy-paste these values into the rules. We recommend using it in the rules to not further complicate your import, but the choice is yours.