Summary

The Commerce API has been designed to offer retailers and payment aggregators a powerful and flexible integration option that can accommodate the most demanding requirements.

The Commerce API exposes standardized endpoints that can be called following a standard “recommended” integration or, for more advanced scenarios, in a variety of different configurations to accommodate the most demanding integrations.

What’s a REST API, anyway?

An API is an application programming interface – put simply, it’s a set of rules that lets programs talk to each other, exposing data and functionality across the internet in a standard way.

REST stands for Representational State Transfer. This is nothing more than a pattern for structuring systems in a way that standardizes the rules for communicating. When people use the term ‘REST API,’ they are typically referring to an API accessed via HTTPS at a predefined set of URLs.

These URLs represent various “resources” - any information or content accessed at that address, which will be returned as JSON (a terse, human, and machine-readable text format). Often, resources have one or more methods that can be performed on them over HTTPS, like GET, POST, PUT and DELETE.

The Commerce API is organized following REST principles. Our API has predictable resource-oriented URLs, accepts form-encoded request bodies, returns JSON-encoded responses, and uses standard HTTP response codes, authentication, and verbs.