What Is an Ecommerce API?

Learn the ins and outs of an API, including the types of ecommerce APIs on the market and top use cases today.

Over the past two decades, APIs have had a powerful effect on ecommerce businesses. Today, merchants are building world-class experiences with best-of-breed technologies and commerce capabilities via API layers. 

This has given development teams a new level of flexibility to build ecommerce websites that meet their brand’s needs today—and will continue to do so years into the future. In this article, we’ll explain the ins and outs of an API, including the types of ecommerce APIs on the market today, the benefits of using an ecommerce API, and the most compelling use cases for an ecommerce API. 

What is an ecommerce API?

API is the industry acronym for application programming interface, which Red Hat explains is a set of definitions and protocols for building and integrating application software. Ecommerce APIs are a subset of APIs that facilitate communication and integrations amongst different ecommerce applications or services without having direct access to the source code. 

For ecommerce platforms, in particular, APIs have become a critical part of creating a platform that’s extensible and interoperable. If anything, especially for ecommerce platforms, APIs have become a must-have, with developers expecting the availability of APIs that enable them to use existing functionality without having to rebuild anything from scratch. 

How do ecommerce APIs work?

Ecommerce APIs, like most APIs, are made available via documentation, accessed via API call, and secured via access tokens. Shopify, for example, hosts its API documentation on publicly available documentation – as do companies like Instagram and Spotify.

API documentation is fairly standardized and typically describes how developers should make a connection, how developers can make requests, and how data should be transferred. APIs come in a wide variety of formats but the most common ones for ecommerce are REST (representational state transfer) and GraphQL.

Even though most APIs are made available via documentation, not all API documentation is public. Many companies house API information within internal documentation to ensure that only approved developers can access and use them. 

Other companies focus on exposing APIs so that first and third-party developers can all have access to them and can all build with those APIs. Other companies still might keep most of their APIs private but gate outside access to them via beta testing programs and exclusive partnerships. 

The former approach – a focus on exposing as many APIs to the public as possible – tends to be the best approach for ecommerce platforms. As Eric Paley, managing partner at Founder Collective, explained, platforms distinguish themselves from other models by offering “the ability for others to build products and ultimately generate revenue on top of it, often in ways the platform creator never imagined.” Networks sound similar – especially because they too tend to offer APIs – but Paley continues, writing that “an API does not a platform make.”

As a result, APIs are essential to platforms – and to ecommerce platforms in particular – in a way that they aren’t to other kinds of businesses. Just as when Amazon split itself into a web of small teams connected by separate interfaces, so the best platforms built a core service and enabled developers to build new services on top of that original functionality – all via API. 

Types of ecommerce APIs

Shopify provides a large set of APIs for developers to build ecommerce solutions. Here are three key categories of APIs that we provide:

• Core commerce APIs: These APIs help developers assemble and form the essential parts of an ecommerce business such as product catalogs, B2B, discounts Ones that offer payments and marketplaces features are also included.
• Data & compliance APIs: These APIs, including ones that offer data analysis and customer privacy features, make it easier for companies using the Shopify platform to use data while following privacy and compliance regulations.
• Shipping & logistics APIs: These APIs, including ones that offer fulfillment and inventory management features, help developers solidify the backbones of their ecommerce business. 

Many more APIs are contained within each category but keeping these three categories in mind helps demonstrate what APIs can do and clarifies the kinds of features that are available. 

Benefits of using ecommerce APIs

There are a range of benefits to using ecommerce APIs – all of which emerge out of the extensibility ecommerce APIs provide. 

Extensibility, in short, is the process of a system or software to be built with, added to, and improved its capabilities easily at scale. Some key benefits to note are:

• Security: One of the core but understated functions of an ecommerce business is the ability to move data back and forth among customers, suppliers, and fulfillment partners. In the midst of these larger communications, customers are making many smaller data input and output requests. With all this information going back and forth, ecommerce APIs are often the best way to manage the flow of data because users can autonomously request information and companies can depend on encryption techniques to keep that data secure.
• Scalability: Ecommerce platforms often, if everything goes well, start suffering from success. If a product goes viral or an influencer promotes your brand, a surge of users can flood your store without much warning. When that happens, you don’t want the store to go down and disappoint those new users (much less stop them from purchasing). By using APIs, you can focus developers on building and maintaining new features rather than having to pull them off that work to scramble against a surge in demand. And with ecommerce APIs, you can add new components without changing the underlying architecture and without having to rethink your approach to scalability. 
• Reusability: With ecommerce APIs, developers can reuse existing code to develop software in a faster and cheaper way. Sometimes, that code comes from external sources but smart developers build internal APIs too, ensuring that once they build a database, for example, every following database use case can build from that foundation.

Across these benefits, the best advantage is that you rarely have to compromise. The reason API-based companies like Stripe and Twilio have seen such success is that they’ve been able to build and offer the best versions of those features. In many cases, it’s not only more efficient to call on APIs instead of building features from scratch – you end up with a better result too. 

When should you use ecommerce APIs?

Often, the best software isn’t built from scratch. The differentiating feature might be built from the ground up, but the rest of the product often consists of solved problems. 

For ecommerce platforms, these might be storefronts, shipping tools, package tracking, and more, which are features that you don’t need to reinvent. And as we covered above, the best APIs often offer the best versions of these features – built by companies that specialize in narrow feature sets. 

For many merchants, shipping is the best use case for an ecommerce API. Shipping is dizzyingly complex and essential to your customers, but rarely a differentiating feature. The best option is often to integrate your ecommerce website with a shipping provider's account and import your data for orders and shipments. 

By adopting and integrating APIs, developers can build applications that they can then enhance and extend over time. As cutting-edge technology emerges – or as customers request features that require it – companies can harness those technologies and continuously develop new ecommerce products without rebuilding from scratch. 

4 ways your enterprise business can use Shopify ecommerce APIs

Shopify is built with a modular approach, so it’s easy for merchants to set up their stores and developers to build apps and custom solutions using APIs to extend the platform. 

Shopify offers plug-and-play features that merchants can use to customize their stores, improve the shopping experience, and amplify their marketing efforts. Much of this work is powered by APIs.

Shopify provides all the API endpoints you need to integrate any new and existing first-party and third-party systems so that you can extend the functionality of Shopify’s core commerce platform. For enterprises, four key APIs include Admin APIs, Functions APIs, Storefront Edge APIs, and B2B APIs.

1. Order, Product, and Customer APIs

Shopify offers several APIs to enable merchants across all industries to manage orders, inventory, and customer data. B2B merchants juggling multiple contacts and locations and pre-negotiated payment terms can use Shopify’s suite of GraphQL APIs designed to help manage these constantly-moving targets.

Shopify’s Admin API allows developers to add their own features and build their own Shopify user experience and support enterprise businesses to manage back-office operations at large scale. These APIs are the primary way that your enterprise apps and back-end systems interact, integrate, and manage data related to your Shopify stores. 

An ERP (enterprise resource planning) system, for example, which offers finance, manufacturing, supply chain, sales, and procurement processes, has long been critical to the success of most enterprises. Our Admin APIs are architected to integrate seamlessly with the most popular ERPs, which allows enterprises to manage the complex business operations on Shopify more efficiently..

2. Shopify Functions and APIs

Shopify Functions is a newer platform that lets developers extend or replace key parts of Shopify’s backend logic with custom logic so that they can create unique commerce experiences. Functions provide a set of APIs for customizing Shopify’s backend logic to build everything from checkout validation rules to product bundles that display right in the checkout:

• Delivery Customization API: Rename, reorder, and sort the delivery options available to buyers during checkout.
• Order Discount API: Create a new type of discount that's applied to all merchandise in the cart.
• Product Discount API: Create a new type of discount that's applied to a particular product or product variant in the cart.
• Payment Customization API: Rename, reorder, and sort the payment methods available to buyers during checkout.

One of the key benefits is that enterprises don’t need to worry about managing their own servers for these custom logics since Shopify will take care of managing and scaling them.

3. Storefront API

Developers and merchants leverage Shopify’s full suite of headless development tools to build best-in-class custom experiences in less time with lower costs. The foundation of Shopify’s headless solution is Storefront API, which gives you access to our commerce capabilities that are critical for creating highly-customized and relevant buyer experiences.

Storefront API is device and product-agnostic, which enables developers to build a wide range of unique buyer experiences on web, mobile apps, video games, AR/VR, and voice, and public apps/sales channels. It’s also deployed to the edge and serves all legitimate requests from both private and public clients without rate limits, which allows you to deliver best-in-class experiences to customers regardless of where they’re located.

4. Checkout APIs

Merchants use Shopify checkout to accept orders and receive payments wherever they sell online. We manage an average of 40,000 checkouts per min/store and processed over 5.5 billion orders. Trusted by the largest brands and flash sellers in the world, Shopify’s checkout platform is battle-hardened by our scale and ready for enterprises. 

Developers can build apps using a set of APIs to extend and augment Shopify checkout with new capabilities. 

• Checkout UI extensions: Add custom UI or content to the checkout process and order status page
• Branding API: Customize the look and feel of checkout
• Shopify Functions API: Extend or replace key parts of Shopify’s backend with custom logic
• Web pixel app extensions: Track customer behavior

Making commerce better for everyone requires everyone’s input

At Shopify, our mission is to make commerce better for everyone. Commerce is complex and full of edge cases, and because it never stops evolving, that complexity can never be captured and solved in one attempt or solution.

We provide an extensible platform for our products and services that face merchants and partners, enabling them to swiftly and easily customize Shopify features to their needs. But we also offer developer-facing APIs that enable third-party developers to solve unique problems via code. By offering this level of extensibility, even the most complex organizations can use Shopify to build fast, reliable apps, supported by the programming languages and frameworks their engineering teams already know and use. 

Our goal is to develop solutions for the core problems that many commerce companies face and address the common patterns that challenge companies across the industry. But beyond this core, we know we can’t resolve every single challenge and use case. Because of that, we provide an extensible platform for third-party developers so that everyone can be involved in the mission of making commerce better for all.