This document is intended for those wanting technical details of how to work with our Harvest service. If you are looking for general information about listing your books on viaLibri then please see our page outlining our Harvest service.

Introduction

Once you’ve signed up for Harvest we will get started on setting up the data connection between your website and our Harvest system. There are a variety of ways this can be done, depending on the software you’ve used to create your website.

For websites built by Bibliopolis, ChrisLands, Creative Computing, or HESCOM-Software there is no further action needed. These website providers have all included the necessary data exports for sending data to our system.

If you’ve built your site using Shopify then all you will need to do is give us permission to access your product data. We will be in touch with instructions shortly after you sign up for Harvest.

If you’re using WordPress (with or without WooCommerce) then you can use our plugins to provide us with data in the correct format. See the section below for details on how to install these.

For other sites, such as those using Squarespace or Wix we will need to “scrape” your site: our system will load all the item listing pages on your site one-by-one and extract the information directly from them. This will be set up by us after you’ve signed up for Harvest and doesn’t require any further action from you.

If your website provider would rather we didn’t scrape your website then they may be interested in providing us access to your inventory data directly using our Harvest XML Format. You can direct them to our documentation page and tell them to contact us if they have any questions.

Harvest WordPress Plugins

We have several different WordPress plugins that can be used to connect your site to viaLibri. Each plugin is designed to help with a particular way of setting up a WordPress e-commerce site.

You can either set these up yourself, or ask us to set them up for you.

• Using WooCommerce? This documentation will outline how to configure your site.
• Using custom post types? Our CPT page has details of what to download and how to configure it.
• Doing something more complicated? We’ve created a WordPress plugin that will shortcut some of the development work (note that some development work is still required). Take a look at the Other WordPress page to find details of how to download the plugin and integrate it into your site.

Harvest XML Format

This is the documentation you want if you’re building your own Harvest integration from scratch. It describes the changes you’ll need to make to your website code to give us access to your data in the right format.