Drupal and Taobao API

It is hardly possible to hold all taobao.com goods on a newly developed Drupal site, as there are billions of them there, nor is it easy to predict exactly what products the user is likely to be looking for. We have solved this dilemma in the following way:

• having used the API we chose the category of goods;
• formed links to these categories (taxonomy used);
• once you have clicked on these links, TaoBao is sent a request which contains the ID of the appropriate category  and uses the taobao.items.search method ;
•  from TaoBao we received product ID, its image and price (other parameters are accessabble, too, if needed), and formed the link;
• as one has clicked on this link a query is being sent to TaoBao which is based on taobao.item.get method. The rest of the item parameters having been added and the node in Drupal with the appropriate parameters gets created.

It's more difficult than it sounds, though, for the deeper you go into the process the more problems you may face, like:

• Taobao limitations on the number of API use instances;
• absence of multi-language translation of goods descriptions;
• products traffic content  leaves much to be desired;
• the site performance leaves much to be desired;
• Chinese as the only working language for Taobao site.

This is by no means a complete list of sticking points that happen on the way to your site's full integration with TaoBao. But I'm proud to say that all of them have been resolved, yet I have failed to learn Chinese :)