3 ms·
In many cases, this is not only computationally expensive on the server, it also requires one or more requests to external APIs which further slows things down.
by mmcconnell1618 6y ago
In many cases, this is not only computationally expensive on the server, it also requires one or more requests to external APIs which further slows things down. Imagine needing to query the API of your tax vendor, then also your shipping provider of choice for every single item displayed on a page. Even if you did this client side, asynchronously, it would be a lot of extra requests for something that most shoppers won't even pay attention to.
I ran an ecommerce platform company for many years and you had merchants with very complex shipping and tax schemes, or you had merchants that made it super simple with a basic rate table. The complex merchants had margin on every order at the cost of processing external API calls. The simple rate table merchants had great margin on some, lost money on others but were happy with their average shipping margin.
- gnuisance 6y agoHaving worked with a major eCom platform as well, this is exactly the standard case. Both shipping and tax are complex problems which do not have a simple solution for scraping by a search engine. Shipping is often highly dependent on the location of the buyer and often involves full estimate calls from each carriers APIs (USPS, FedEx, UPS). The only major data point I would focus on is whether the shipping is free or flat rate. Tax is even more complicated. Merchants often outsource tax calculations to a third-party service such as Avalara, which calculates unbelievably complex taxing schemes even down to the zip code, as tax laws are becoming increasingly more complex. Because of these reasons taxes and shipping are not widely useful data points for search engines. That may change in the future, however. I could imagine it becoming another SEO topic to be accounted for, similar to meta tags on product pages.