Table of Contents
  1. E-commerce Platform APIs
  2. Third-Party E-Commerce Website APIs
  3. Payment Gateway APIs
  4. Website Builder APIs
  5. CRM APIs
  6. Customer Support APIs
  7. Inventory Management APIs
  8. How Integrate.io Can Help with E-Commerce APIs

The seven best e-commerce APIs and integrations are:

  1. E-commerce platform APIs for making your e-commerce data available to other apps and services.
  2. Third-party e-commerce website APIs for selling your products in other marketplaces.
  3. Payment gateway APIs for handling purchases and payment processing.
  4. Website builder APIs for integrating your web design and development.
  5. CRM APIs for managing customer interactions with your business.
  6. Customer support APIs for efficiently handling queries and problems.
  7. Inventory management APIs for managing orders and stock levels.

If you're just starting out with your e-commerce store, it can be difficult to know what the best e-commerce APIs, tools, and technologies your startup needs in order to begin. Running an e-commerce business requires a wide range of functionality beyond simply selling products from your storefront with your e-commerce platform. For your online store to have the best chance at success, you'll need the help of a wide range of third-party software applications that do everything from streamlining inventory management to helping with customer support.

To make full use of all these systems, however, you'll need a dedicated e-commerce solution for handling the APIs and integrations between them. In the field of IT, an integration (also called a connector) is a pre-built component, plugin, or add-on that allows two unrelated apps or services to communicate and share information. An API (application programming interface) is a set of rules and definitions that describes how these two services can communicate in order to facilitate the integration process.

With so many possibilities on the market, how can you select the best e-commerce APIs and integrations? In this article, we'll investigate seven of your options for e-commerce integrations and APIs, so that you can make the choices that are right for your business.

Looking for the right e-commerce API integration solution for your business? Get started with a 7-day pilot of Integrate.io today.

1. E-Commerce Platform APIs

The question of the best e-commerce platform for online businesses is hotly debated. The good news is that you have plenty of options: the most popular e-commerce platforms include Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, and WooCommerce, just to name a few.

As your e-commerce site grows, you'll collect more and more data about customer behavior—everything from the products that people put in their shopping cart to the percentage of users who abandon their purchase before checkout. Savvy store owners must harvest and analyze this information, scouring it for hidden trends and insights to help them make smarter decisions.

To do so, you'll often need to process your data with third-party analytics tools and data warehouses. In order to get your data out of your e-commerce platform in the first place, you need a dedicated API for your e-commerce solution. Whether you need a Shopify API, BigCommerce API, Magento API, or WooCommerce API, the "best e-commerce API" here is the one that makes it easy for you to export data from your e-commerce platform and import it into other apps and systems.

Developing APIs can be a complex, time consuming, and expensive process. It can also expose your organization to a number of risks including consistency, quality, and developer resourcing. DreamFactory is a REST API generation platform for a range of databases and other data sources. It gives you the ability to generate secure and fully documented APIs in a matter of minutes. Ready to get started?  Sign up for a 14-day free trial and start creating your APIs today.

2. Third-Party E-Commerce Website APIs

In addition to selling products on your own website, you might wish to sell them on a third-party e-commerce store like Amazon, eBay, or Etsy. For maximum efficiency, you'll need an Amazon API or eBay API that your e-commerce platform can easily integrate with. These are the best e-commerce APIs for third-party stores, allowing you to automatically update your storefronts with new products and pricing whenever things change on your main website.

3. Payment Gateway APIs

E-commerce stores need to integrate with payment gateways such as Stripe and PayPal that allow users to make purchases with the payment method of their choice (e.g. credit card, debit card, bank transfer, or even cryptocurrency). The best e-commerce API for payment gateways can automatically connect your e-commerce website's checkout system with a third-party payment gateway that handles these concerns for you. Other benefits of payment gateway APIs include a better user experience and easier fraud prevention.

4. Website Builder APIs

Some e-commerce platforms come with their own website builder tools, but you might also want to use a third-party website builder like WordPress or Squarespace. These solutions make it simpler to build your own website front-end with various plugins and templates, while handling the backend concerns for you under the hood. If you plan on going this route, you'll need one of the best e-commerce APIs so that your website builder tool can communicate with your e-commerce platform. For example, WordPress comes with a REST API so that you can easily access each one of the posts and pages on your website.

5. CRM APIs

Customer relationship management (CRM) software helps your sales, marketing, and customer service teams track each one of their interactions with your customers. By staying on top of each touchpoint and channel—from phone and email to website visits and social media—it will be much easier for you to offer an excellent customer experience. CRM integrations are one of the best e-commerce APIs for online stores to take advantage of. The good news is that CRM platforms such as Salesforce expose their information through an API, so that you can easily export it to a centralized target location (such as a data warehouse or data lake).

Want to see for yourself how Integrate.io can link up your e-commerce website with your CRM, website builder tools, payment gateways, and more? Contact us today to start your 7-day pilot of the Integrate.io platform.

6. Customer Support APIs

As your company grows from small business to worldwide retailer, you need an effective customer support solution without sacrificing scalability. Customer support tools such as Zendesk, Freshworks, and Intercom help you efficiently monitor and resolve queries, issues, and complaints. Because customer support data holds tremendously useful information, you should look for a solution with one of the best e-commerce APIs so that you can export all this data into a third-party analytics tool. You can then track metrics and KPIs to ensure that your customer service remains high-quality at all times.

7. Inventory Management APIs

Last but not least, an inventory management and order management API is one of the best e-commerce APIs for online shopping businesses. Inventory management software helps you keep track of your products' stock levels, so that you can predict issues and resolve them (e.g., by manufacturing more items) before they occur. Order management software helps you track e-commerce orders throughout their lifecycle, from the moment they're placed to the moment they're shipped from your warehouse.

How Integrate.io Can Help With E-Commerce APIs

Thus far, we've talked about the best e-commerce APIs and integrations for your website. But how can you handle the challenging task of getting all these integrations to cooperate under one roof? That's exactly what Integrate.io was built for.

Integrate.io is a dedicated ETL (extract, transform, load) and data integration solution that has been built from the ground up for e-commerce. Integrate.io makes it easy to connect your data sources through automation and streamline and optimize your data pipeline. The Integrate.io platform includes more than 140 pre-built connectors and integrations, including popular e-commerce solutions like Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento.

Thanks to Integrate.io's visual drag-and-drop interface, even non-technical beginners can start building robust, production-ready data workflows. Integrate.io also comes with several tremendously valuable capabilities, such as the FlyData CDC (change data capture) feature that automatically detects which data records have changed since your last integration job. In addition, Integrate.io supports reverse ETL, letting you easily transfer information out of your centralized data warehouse and into specialized third-party systems.

Ready to learn how Integrate.io can help with your choice of the best e-commerce APIs and integrations? Get in touch with our team of e-commerce data experts today for a chat about your business needs and objectives, and to start your 7-day pilot of the Integrate.io platform