Shopping Cart REST API: A Brief Guide to Integrating with It
Tags: webdev, programming, python, devops
Published: 2022-06-02 15:28:39

 The eCommerce sphere has seen steady growth in recent years. Despite fierce competition, many merchants create an online presence for their stores. As a result, many software programs have been produced that automate some business processes for online retailers.

In order to be able to propose your functionality to online store owners, you need to integrate with the eCommerce platforms on which the stores are built. For this reason, you will have to learn about the shopping cart REST API and how to integrate your software with it.

In addition, the more platforms your system integrates with, the higher your coverage of the market. Yet, more connections also present specific difficulties during the integration development process. Therefore, to avoid problems, you need to be aware of the specifics of such integrations.

In this article, we'll cover some popular shopping cart REST APIs and a unified API for connecting to various eCommerce APIs at the same time.

##REST API Meaning

[A REST API](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer) is a web API that conforms to the REST architectural style and allows interaction with RESTful web services. 

REST APIs communicate with standard database functions via HTTP requests, such as creating, reading, updating and deleting data within a resource.

For example, the HTTP GET method retrieves data and the POST method creates one. The PUT method updates data and the DELETE method deletes one. The standard HTTP methods can be used in API calls.

Clients can receive information in various formats, including JSON, HTML, XLT, Python, PHP, or plain text. Due to its human- and machine-readable properties and its language-agnostic structure, JSON is perhaps the most widely used file format.

##Shopping Cart REST API Meaning

The Shopping Cart REST API provides access to a variety of store-related information in a REST architectural style. Such an API allows developers to retrieve, add, update, and delete information from stores like orders, products, customers, categories, and so on.

A shopping cart REST API integration means a connection between an application or software and an eCommerce platform. As a result, software providers can offer online store owners a variety of valuable features. These functions include order and inventory management, product sync, customer management, etc.

Let's examine a few popular shopping cart REST APIs and their features.

##Examples of Shopping Cart REST APIs

There are many shopping platforms available today that allow retailers to build an online store according to their needs and possibilities. To remain competitive and satisfy the needs of a wide range of online merchants, eCommerce software must integrate with many shopping platforms.

To help you understand what it takes to integrate your software with shopping carts, we’ve gathered some specifics regarding several major shopping cart REST APIs.

###WooCommerce REST API

WooCommerce is one of the platforms that has a REST API, which enables you to work with related data to products, orders, categories, and more. Developers can create, read, update, and delete data using this API. It also allows them to add stocks, filter orders, and perform other such activities.

###Magento REST API

[The Magento REST APIs](https://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.4/rest/bk-rest.html) include many functions for sending requests and receiving responses. The HTTP protocol is used to accomplish a variety of tasks relating to the sending and receiving of data.

Magento REST API includes the elements such as HTTP Headers, HTTP Verb, Endpoint, and Call Payload.

###Squarespace REST API

Squarespace Commerce API provides Orders API to access information about active and completed orders, Products API to get and manage product lists and images, and Transaction API to access transaction history data. All Squarespace Commerce APIs are HTTPS-enabled, and REST principles were used in their design.

##Developing an Integration with Shopping Cart REST APIs

It can be challenging to integrate with a single shopping cart REST API, let alone multiple APIs.  When integrating an API, you'll go through a series of steps including onboarding, exploration, education, authentication, code samples, testing, monitoring, and sandboxing.

Integrating an application with an API involves discovering the APIs, creating and testing the services that will communicate with those APIs, adapting the application to communicate with those services, and finally implementing the finished application.

As the number of APIs used by eCommerce applications grows, the need for integration with them will increase. The growth of API integration services and tools is a response to the needs of developers.

[Using an API integration service](https://api2cart.com/how-it-works/?utm_source=dev.to&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=shoppingcartrestapikh.ol) you can perform integration with multiple eCommerce platforms at once. It allows you to work with various store data like orders, products, customers, categories, shipments, etc. In addition, it handles all of your eCommerce integrations, eliminating the need to manually upgrade them.