Our APIs return a max of 250 records at a time, which means that developers requesting more than 250 items need to paginate the collection and loop over each page. James Summerfield, Technical Lead at Google. And even though we can broadly agree that change is good, that doesn’t mean it’s easy. You might make the assumption that a change will be non-breaking, without anticipating that it is a breaking change for someone using your API in an unconventional way.This might seem like a simple shift in thinking, but it’s a powerful one. We also keep our eyes and ears open — one of the biggest inputs into our API development process are the interviews and conversations we have directly with developers who work with our APIs.When making changes to an API, it’s important to understand the established behaviors of the API that developers rely upon. API changes can either be backward compatible, meaning they don’t require modifications on the part of clients consuming the API, or non-backward compatible, meaning action would be required to avoid breaking integrations.We’ve designed our v3 API to increase efficiency with GET operations as well. What’s New in V3? The goal of the API contract is to establish consistency among the internal teams who are building an API and to document an API’s expected behaviors for clients building API integrations. In the v3 model, a variant is a sellable unit you can track inventory against — essentially, an item that sits on a shelf in a warehouse.
Examples of breaking changes include subtractive changes, or removing a resource or required field, or adding a new field that’s required. With v3, you can know exactly how many pages there will be ahead of time.It’s inevitable that change will happen — without it, we wouldn’t have innovation. We can think of the API contract as not just a document that describes an API, but also as an agreement between the API creator and the client that defines the behavior developers can expect to build integrations around.We’ve set the stage with some background on how we’re thinking about API versioning at BigCommerce, but now we’ll get into the specifics of what’s new with the latest version of our API. From developers, we heard that creating products required too many API calls and the product data model was difficult to sync with third party systems.API updates are a chance to reevaluate our approach and make performance improvements that help developers work more productively with our APIs. We’d need to make separate calls to create the product, add an image, create options, create an option set, add the option set to the product….that’s a lot of API calls just to create a single product.
These changes represented a substantial change to the API contract and would not have been possible without releasing a new major version of the API.Another new feature in v3 is the meta object at the end of each response, which contains information about pagination. With that in mind, we always choose to err on the side of transparency and reliability even, if that means we don’t count every single order that is processed in a store. From merchants, we heard that features like option sets and rules were difficult to conceptualize and creating products required navigating through multi-screen workflows. With the v3 API, creating a complex product takes one API call.Just like relationships, organisms, and opinions, APIs evolve. Our API lets you work more efficiently by offering access to products, variants and modifiers, with the variant as the lowest common denominator.BigCommerce APIs are designed to be backwards compatible and future proof, ensuring your integration will still work properly even as our platform evolves.Connect your brick-and-mortar POS with your online store to streamline inventory management and reduce overselling.Publish across sales channels with real-time synchronization and manage all your products from a single location.Unique to BigCommerce, our Catalog API enables you to sell your products on multiple channels from a single platform.
If I upgrade to v3, can downgrade back to v2?
The spec file typically includes all of the requests a client can make to an API as well which fields are required and the expected response format.
Discover 100s of ecommerce apps and integrations in the BigCommerce Apps Marketplace ranging from advertising and analytics and email to marketing and mobile and multichannel listings. What can you build with our catalog API?
The ability to sync large, complex catalogs to Google Shopping in a matter of minutes makes our integration with BigCommerce both reliable and scalable. One of the biggest transformations was the introduction of variants. For example, in v2, the price of an XXL t-shirt might have had a rule that added $2 to the base product price of $10. When we think of variants as discrete physical units, we can assign qualities on the variant level that are useful to track — SKU codes, weight, dimensions, and price adjustments.