Using the Sell Anything API

The Sell Anything API requires you to explicitly request tracking for individual products and stores. This guide will walk you through the steps required to request tracking for products and stores, how to retrieve information about them once they have been tracked, and how to maintain your own copy of the product data.

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Tutorial

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Step 1: Request tracking for products and stores

Rye has three different API operations that can be used to request tracking for products and stores:

• requestAmazonProductByURL

  Used to request individual Amazon products. This operation returns a productId field which should be stored on your end for the next step.

• requestShopifyProductByURL

  Used to request individual Shopify products. This operation returns both a canonicalDomain and productId field, both of which should be stored on your end for use in the next step.

• requestStoreByURL

  Used to request entire Shopify stores. This operation returns a canonicalDomain value which you should keep track of for the next step.

For each product or store you selected in the previous step, your technical implementation team should send a GraphQL request which hits the relevant API operation. For instance, if you wanted to sell these Gymshark leggings you would send the following GraphQL request:

mutation {
  requestShopifyProductByURL(
    url: "https://www.gymshark.com/products/gymshark-adapt-camo-seamless-leggings-black-onyx-grey-aw22"
  ) {
    canonicalDomain
    productId
  }
}

This request returns the fields canonicalDomain and productId. Both of these fields should be stored on your end, as they are useful for subsequent API operations. canonicalDomain can be used with productsByDomainV2, and productId can be used with productByID to retrieve information about this product at a later date.

These mutations will add your requested product or store to a queue, and it will eventually be processed by our system. This process can take up to 24 hours, but usually completes within a few minutes. You can verify that the data has pulled through to Rye’s systems by querying for the product.

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Step 2: Query product information

After you have requested tracking for a product or store, you can retrieve information using the following API operations:

• productByID

  Used to retrieve information about a specific product. This works for both Amazon and Shopify products. You will need a productId value here, which you should have stored from Step 1.

• productsByDomainV2

  Used to retrieve all products from a specific store. This works for Shopify stores. You will need a canonicalDomain value here, which you should have stored from Step 1.

We generally recommend using productsByDomainV2—unless you are selling Amazon products—as it allows you to query product data efficiently in bulk as opposed to fetching everything one-by-one. The following GraphQL documents will retrieve information about the Gymshark leggings we requested in Step 1:

Note that there are many more fields available on a product than just the id and title. Check out the following API reference pages for a complete listing of fields available to query:

• AmazonProduct
• ShopifyProduct

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Step 3: Keep your product data up to date

Now that you’ve requested tracking and have verified that you are able to query product information, you need to decide how you want this product information to flow through to your frontend. There are two main strategies for doing this:

1. Server-side sync (recommended). Under this strategy, you will perform a one-off sync of all products you are tracking with Rye into your own database. After performing the initial data pull, you will keep your copy of the data up to date by receiving webhooks from Rye when product catalog data changes. This option is recommended as it affords you the most control over the data and allows you to query it in a way that is most efficient for your use case.
2. Client-side queries. Under this strategy, you will query Rye’s API directly from your frontend to retrieve product data. This is simpler, but significantly less flexible.

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Server-side sync (recommended)

To implement server-side sync using webhooks, you will need to do the following:

1. Set up webhooks per our guide.
2. Handle the PRODUCT_UPDATED webhook event.

When you requested products and stores in the previous step, Rye automatically created subscriptions on your account for updates to those products. There is no further action required on your part to receive these updates once you have requested tracking and set up a webhook endpoint.

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Client-side queries

Client-side queries can be performed via JWT authentication. This method is mentioned for completeness’ sake, but for gifting platforms we strongly recommend server-side sync as it avoids potential privacy issues down the line. We have more in-depth discussion on this in the next section, where we explain how to place gifting orders.

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Congratulations!

At this point you have successfully started tracking all of your products and stores inside Rye’s API, and are able to pull product catalog data through to your frontend application. The next step from here is to implement a checkout flow so that users can purchase products and you can start earning revenue.