Get Started with the B2C Commerce API

The B2C Commerce API is a collection of RESTful APIs for interacting with B2C Commerce instances. It goes by a few different names: Salesforce Commerce API, the acronym SCAPI, or just Commerce API.

The API enables developers to build a wide range of applications: from full storefronts to custom merchant tools to augment Business Manager. For all B2C Commerce customers, the API is available at no extra cost.

The API is broken into two main groups of APIs: Shopper APIs and Admin APIs. And within each group, they’re divided into API families and into smaller groups focused on related functionality.

Let’s compare the two API groups side by side:

A key part of the B2C Commerce API is the Shopper Login and API Access Service (SLAS). The SLAS authorization endpoints provide the tokens that secure access to the Shopper APIs. Tokens are provided using a variety of grant types defined by the OAuth 2.1 standard.

Besides securing access to the Shopper API, SLAS can also enable the following features in your application: third-party identify providers, single sign-on, and personalization.

To learn more about SLAS and how to use it in your application, see the SLAS guides.

Open-source JavaScript SDKs are available on npm to help developers quickly get started with the API:

For developers that want to use the B2C Commerce API in a React app and get a head start on development, we offer the Progressive Web App Kit (PWA Kit) framework. You can deploy PWA Kit applications to Salesforce’s public-cloud infrastructure with a companion product called the Managed Runtime.

To learn more about PWA Kit and Managed Runtime, see the product documentation.

The B2C Commerce API is separate from the Open Commerce API (OCAPI). Although you can accomplish many of the same tasks with either API, there isn’t complete feature parity between them.

• Targets commerce operations within Salesforce Commerce Cloud. It is tailored to provide endpoints and functionalities that are essential for managing e-commerce-specific tasks and enhancing commerce-related processes.
• Focuses on incorporating new services. For example, with the introduction of Inventory services, SCAPI exposes these services to external systems.

• Covers a broad range of functionalities, offering endpoints for product search, basket manipulation, and order processing.
• Designed to be flexible and customizable, allowing developers to integrate and extend e-commerce capabilities seamlessly.
• Follows industry standards, making it interoperable and ensuring that developers can work with it using familiar practices and tools.

The behaviour of Shopper APIs can be customized using hooks included in cartridges deployed on your B2C Commerce instance.

For more information, see Extensibility via Hooks.

You can use correlation IDs to match a particular request to a particular response, making it easier to troubleshoot unexpected issues, such as internal server errors.

If a correlation-id header is provided in a request to a B2C Commerce API endpoint, the response contains an x-correlation-id header that contains the value of correlation-id. The API also generates its own correlation ID for each response.

To learn more about correlating API requests and responses, see Identifying Requests and Responses.

• To use the B2C Commerce API with staging environments set to use vanity domains, you must set up eCDN for Staging.
• To improve performance, Shopper API family requests are routed to ECOM servers using the token's Unique Shopper ID (USID). To avoid overloading a single server, don't use the same USID to make requests on behalf of many guest shoppers.
• B2C Commerce API does not support cross origin requests. To use it with web browsers, use a reverse proxy.
• B2C Commerce API does not interpret CORS headers.

Each group of resources within the B2C Commerce API is regularly updated with bug fixes, security updates, performance optimizations, new features, and other improvements. These updates are typically announced in the release notes after the updates are made.

While we avoid making breaking changes without prior notification, some updates include nonbreaking changes, such as:

• New endpoints
• New methods added to existing endpoints
• New body fields
  • New fields in responses
  • New optional request fields
  • New required request fields that have default values
• Changes to the order of fields in the response body
• New optional request and response headers
• New optional query parameters
• New required query parameters that have default values
• Changes to error responses. We don’t recommend parsing error messages to perform business logic. Use HTTP response codes and error types instead.
• New claims added to the SLAS JWT.
• Reordering of existing claims in the SLAS JWT.
• Fixes to HTTP response codes and error codes from incorrect code to correct code

You can subscribe to updates regarding the availability of B2C Commerce API services on Salesforce Status.

To try out the API with a demo sandbox and sample data, go to the API and SDK Demo.

When you’re ready to start setting up your own instances to use the API, see the Configuration Values and Authorization for Shopper APIs guides.

To explore the full capabilities of each set of API endpoints, see the specifications in the Reference section.