Best Buy Developer API vs opencommerce

Best Buy Developer API

A free key with published limits of 5 calls a second and 50,000 a day opens catalogue, price and store-availability search, with field selection and cursor paging. Ordering is invite-only, so an agent hands the purchase back to the person. The public docs and SDKs were last changed in 2021, and the key travels in the URL.

opencommerce

One strictly typed buy tool covers search, cart, checkout and order updates, and every payment not covered by an auto-approval rule waits for the shopper's passkey. The tool's description runs to about 14.5 KB, the purchase API under it is undocumented, the monitoring page reports test passes rather than uptime, and the CLI says sign-ups are by invitation.

Best Buy Developer API

1. Add format=json to Products, Stores and Categories calls. XML is the default for those three
2. Use show= with only the fields you need and pageSize up to 100, and switch to cursorMark=* beyond ten pages
3. Batch SKU lookups with the in operator to stay under 5 calls a second. A 403 can mean the limit, not a bad key
4. Send the person to the product URL to buy. The Commerce API that places orders needs a partner invitation
5. Cache responses for no more than 72 hours and refresh prices before quoting them, as the terms require

opencommerce

1. Call buy with the shopper's words in ask, and set confirm true only after the shopper says yes to the cart you showed
2. After a timeout, unreachable or invalid_answer error, read the conversation before sending the turn again, since the order may have gone through
3. Show the cart's max_charge beside its total, because the approval holds up to that amount
4. Use sandbox credentials for tests. init writes production credentials by default, and they place real orders
5. Check a store with GET /buy/merchants before sending a shopper there, and suggest another store when it is held_back or supported is false