Catalog API
The Catalog refers to a store’s collection of physical and digital products. The Catalog includes all the information about a product such as MPN, warranty, price, and images.
The term “Catalog” refers to the collection of virtual representations of an e-commercemerchant’s saleable products, stored within the BigCommerce platform. The catalog domain also encompasses related functions that augment the ability to communicate product details to shoppers–things like product reviews, bulk pricing, and more.
The BigCommerce Catalog API manages products, brands, and categories for a store.
Catalog API is used for POS Integrations,Connect a merchant’s brick-and-mortar POS with their online store to streamline inventory management and reduce overselling.
Headless commerce – Pull in products from BigCommerce into an external site Catalog API is necessary.
Moving Catalog – Moving products from one storeto another
Filters
Filters give you the ability to specify what’s included in the response, whether that’s including
extra properties that are not normally returned or just reducing how many things are returned.
That overhead will add up as your application scales.
Includes
Includes allow you to save API calls by getting more information in a response. However, it may slow down your response.
Example: – /v3/catalog/products?include=variants,images
include_fields: – will return the specified fields in the response.
exclude_fields: – will omit the specified fields from the response.
Pagination: – ?page is the number of pages that are returned via api.
Netsuite: – ?limit is the number of results per page that are returned.
Example:- page=2&limit=10 This will return page 2 of the results with 10 items per page.
Metadata is additional information that is included on every Catalog API request.
Example :- “meta”: {
“pagination”: {
“total”: 25,
“count”: 5,
“per_page”: 5,
“current_page”: 1,
“total_pages”: 5,
“links”: {
“next”: “?limit=5&page=2”,
“current”: “?limit=5&page=1”
},
“too_many”: false
}
}
}
Create a Variant: – POST request to
/catalog/products/{product_id}/options
Example:https://api.bigcommerce.com/stores/{store-hash}/v3/catalog/products/{product_id}/options
Get all Variant OPtions: – GET
/catalog/products/{product_id}/options
Example: – https://api.bigcommerce.com/stores/{store-hash}/v3/
catalog/products/{product_id}/variants
Creates a product variant.
Example: – https://api.bigcommerce.com/stores/{store-
hash}/v3/
catalog/products/{product_id}/variants
To see Variants, Variant Options, or Modifier Options on a product, you can send a GETrequest using the v3 API and a Rest client such as Postman to:
{productId}/variants
{productId}/options
hash/v3/catalog/products/{productId}/modifiers.
More about catalog: –
GraphQL Storefront API
BigCommerce’s GraphQL Storefront API makes it possible to query storefront data from within a Stencil theme or remote site. This means information previously only available on the back-end using Stencil’s template logic can now be accessed with front-end JavaScript.
GraphQL API can: –
- Access product options, variations, and custom fields for any product from any page.
- Request any product’s images at any resolution.
- Ask for customer details such as name, email address, and attributes (if logged in).
- Look up objects, such as categories or brands, by URL, and fetch their details.
- Build front-end applications on top of a BigCommerce Stencil theme or on a remote site.
To access the GraphQL Storefront API Playground and documentation, sign in to your store and navigate to Settings > API> Storefront API Playground.
To use the request runner, input queries on the left side and then click the Play button. Query results will be displayed on the right side.
Authentication
The GraphQL API authorizes requests with a bearer token. A bearer token is exposed to Stencil via Handlebars so it is accessible by JavaScript in the theme or Script Manager.
GraphQL Storefront API requests are authenticated with tokens sent via the HTTP authorizationheader :
Example: curl ‘https://{bigcommerce_storefront_domain}.com/graphql
-H ‘Authorization: Bearer {token}’\
Creating token
Use the Create a GraphQL Storefront API token REST endpoint to request JWT-style bearer tokens that authenticate cross-origin requests to the GraphQL Storefront API.
Example request: Create a GraphQL Storefront API token
POSThttps://api.bigcommerce.com/stores/{{STORE_HASH}}/v3/storefront/api-token
X-Auth-Token: {{access_token}}
Accept: application/json
Content-Type: application/json
{
“channel_id”: 1, // int (must be a valid channel ID on the store)
“expires_at”: 1602288000, // double utc unix timestamp (required)
“allowed_cors_origins”: [ // array (accepts 1 origin currently)
“https://example.com”
]
}
Authenticating with an Auto-Generated Stencil Token Client code in BigCommerce Stencil themes can be passed a token at render time with the {{settings.storefront_api.token}}
Example: –
f fetch(‘/graphql’, {
method: ‘POST’,
credentials: ‘same-origin’,
headers: {
‘Content-Type’: ‘application/json’,
‘Authorization’: ‘Bearer {{settings.storefront_api.token}}’
},
body: JSON.stringify({ query: `query MyFirstQuery {…}`})
})
then(res => console.log(res))
catch(error => console.error(error));
Note:
The channel_id for the default Stencil storefront 1 can be passed in for the channel_id for
generating tokens for use on the default Stencil storefront.
To create a channel for a remote site, see [Create Channel] in the API Reference .
Allowed_cors_origins array accepts only a single origin currently – one token must be generated for each origin.
/storefront/api-token endpoint requires the Manage Storefront API Tokens OAuth Scope.
storefront/api-token-customer-impersonation endpoint requires the Manage Storefront
API Customer Impersonation Tokens OAuth Scope: –
It’s also possible to generate tokens for use in server-to-server interactions with a trusted consumer using the Create a customer impersonation token endpoint. Consult the endpoint’s documentation to determine what OAuth scopes it requires.
Customer login: –
If you’re using the GraphQL Storefront API from a browser, for example, on top of your Stencil storefront, you can use the new Customer Login mutation to sign in to a customer account with an email address and a password. For server-side integrations, consider a customer impersonation token instead. This will set a session cookie in the browser which will authenticate the customer account on future requests
For reference: –