14 Essential Ecommerce APIs You Need to Run Your Online Store

In today's competitive ecommerce industry, customer experience is everything. To deliver a seamless, personalized experience to your customers, you have to go beyond the templates and native features of your ecommerce platform.

By adopting the right tools and technologies, you can elevate your ecommerce site and customize your customer experience. And one of the most important pieces of technology for any ecommerce business is APIs.

APIs allow you to connect different software applications and systems. These connections are essential for any ecommerce business that wants to create a seamless, integrated experience for its customers.

To reap their benefits, it's important to understand what an API is, why they're important for ecommerce, and know what APIs are out there for ecommerce websites.

What is an API and why are they important for ecommerce?

APIs, or application programming interfaces, are connections that allow software applications to communicate with each other.

They're an essential part of modern web development. They allow different applications to share data and functionality, making it possible to create complex, integrated systems.

As far as ecommerce goes, they're important for a few key reasons. They allow you to design custom website experiences for your customers. And because they allow you to use data across all your tools and systems, APIs make it possible to personalize shopping experiences and marketing communications. Both these things can improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, and can help businesses stand out from the competition.

And APIs can allow businesses to automate certain tasks and processes. This can save time and money, and help businesses run more efficiently.

14 essential ecommerce APIs

There are hundreds of different APIs, each with its own specific purpose. To help you get a handle on the APIs available to you, here's a list of essential categories of ecommerce APIs.

1. Ecommerce platform APIs

Whatever ecommerce platform you run your store on — whether it's Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, or Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento) — it will have a ton of APIs available to connect to other software in your tool stack.

These APIs will be the bread and butter of your ecommerce store, enabling you to connect to your website hosting platform so you can get your store online, and providing connections for add-ons that enhance your website beyond what it looks like out of the box.

2. Shopping cart API

This ecommerce API allows you to create a custom shopping cart. Custom carts mean you can design and optimize your shopping cart experience to drive more conversions and reduce abandoned carts. You can even increase average order value (AOV) by adding features like cross-sell and upsell recommendations.

3. Checkout API

A checkout API integration will allow you to optimize the checkout experience to achieve many of the same goals as your shopping cart API. As a customer's final step to becoming a paying customer, a streamlined, optimized checkout experience can be the difference between a conversion and an abandoned cart.

So a checkout API can allow you to experiment with the design and additional features that make customers more likely to convert and more likely to increase their cart value before doing so.

4. Sales tax API

Accurate sales tax is critical for any business that sells products online so that you can charge customers appropriately. Otherwise, you could be paying those taxes to the IRS out of your business profits. But taxes are complicated, differing by state, county, and city. So a sales tax API ensures you're charging the right amount.

5. Fraud prevention API

Fraud is a reality of doing business online. But there are ways to minimize fraud and chargebacks with a fraud prevention API. This type of API connects to your ecommerce platform so you can automatically identify risk factors and red flags that could indicate fraud.

By flagging potential fraudsters before their order ships, you can avoid the headache (and financial loss) of dealing with chargebacks.

6. Product catalog API

A product catalog API provides access to product data. It allows you to manage product information, including descriptions, images, inventory levels, and prices across all your sales channels.

This is essential to keeping product information up-to-date and a huge time saver if you sell on marketplaces or have hundreds or thousands of product SKUs.

7. Inventory management API

An inventory management API gives you the ability to track and manage inventory levels between your warehouses and all your sales channels. This is important for two reasons.

First, it allows you to keep product availability up-to-date, so customers don't purchase items that are out of stock. Second, it can help track when to place new purchase orders from the factory to avoid running out of stock.

8. Order management API

An order management API allows you to manage order information, track delivery information, and manage post-order actions such as issuing refunds or cancellations. This is one piece of making the logistics of getting a customer their order seamless.

9. Payment API

A payment API allows you to process payments on your website. This is an essential piece of any ecommerce transaction, and a payment API can help streamline the process and make it more efficient.

Payment APIs have become more essential as brands build out mobile apps or adopt a headless storefront.

10. Customer accounts API

This API lets you manage customer accounts. This enables a variety of tasks such as creating and managing passwords, contact information, payment cards, customer service notes, opt-ins to marketing communications, and order history.

11. Shipping API

A shipping API provides access to shipping rates and methods from various carriers. And it can connect to your 3PL (third-party logistics) vendor so that they can easily print shipping labels and packing slips. This API is an obvious essential for online stores.

12. Marketing API

Marketing APIs allow you to create customized marketing communications using customer data. Marketing APIs can connect marketing tools (like your email service, SMS software, loyalty program, review software, and social media tools) to other tools like your ecommerce platform, or to each other, to automate marketing efforts.

These APIs are essential for driving audience growth, earning new customers, and building customer loyalty.

13. Analytics API

An analytics API provides access to ecommerce data that can be used to track website traffic, conversion rates, and other key metrics.

This is important for understanding if you're reaching your business goals, what marketing campaigns are working, and how customers interact with your website.

14. Customer Service API

Customer service APIs allow you to connect your help desk to everywhere else you have customer data like your marketing software, ecommerce platform, and CRM (customer relationship management) system.

Then your customer service agents can have customer information at their fingertips. And any customer service data can be used on other platforms.

Create better experiences with ecommerce APIs

These are just some of the essential APIs that ecommerce sites need to run their online stores effectively.

By using these APIs, you can create a custom, seamless experience for your customers. And by integrating your different software applications and systems, you can automate tasks and processes, saving time and money. Ultimately, ecommerce APIs help you stand out from the competition and grow your business.

Next, learn about the best integrations for your ecommerce website.