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BigCommerce API Limit

Question

I'm interested in your integration with BigCommerce to synchronize my POS inventory.  However, I have a few questions about how BigCommerce's API calls work.  Does BigCommerce limit the number of API calls I can make?  Will I get charged more if I reach their limit?  What happens to the integration if their limit is reached? Will the data be lost or will it continue where it left off?

Any insight you can provide would be very helpful. Thank you.

Answer

Thank you for your interest in Modern Retail and our BigCommerce Integrator.  We'd love to help you get your point of sale system integrated with BigCommerce.

I'd be happy to share with you what we've learned about BigCommerce's API limits.  However, I would encourage you to talk to your BigCommerce sales rep to get concrete answers to your specific plan.

BigCommerce seems to lump their clients into two groups when you talk about their API:

  1. Non-Enterprise Customers - 20,000 calls / hour
  2. Enterprise Cusotmers - 2,000,000 calls / hour

Standard, Plus and Pro BigCommerce Customers all seem to have the same number of API calls, which is 20,000 per hour.  This is a significant number of API calls per hour and only stores with large catalogs should run into this limit.  Modern Retail finds in practice most retailers don't hit this limit.  Of course if you catalog is large with a lot of variants, like with shoes, and you have frequent changes in inventory and pricing, then you may hit this limit.

The limit for Enterprise Customers is insanely large and frankly we've never had a customer hit this limit.

Regarding your other questions, we have never heard of a customer getting charged more when their API limit was hit.  Instead, we see the API calls simply being paused and resume automatically once the new hour starts.  During this time there is absolutely no data loss!  Our integration detects this pause and cues up the changes until the BigCommerce API resume again.

Modern Retail has developed some great technology over the years which significantly cuts down on the number of API calls made in the first place.  The most significant one being our integration is a "difference engine".  To understand how this could affect you, please read:

 I think that about does it.  Please let me know if you have any more questions. Thank you.