Before start develop

Before You Start

Before building with our APIs, we strongly recommend reviewing the following sections of this documentation. These paragraphs outline essential concepts, requirements, and best practices that will help you avoid common pitfalls and ensure a smooth integration. Understanding these guidelines upfront will save you time, improve reliability, and allow you to make the most out of our API features.

Four Way Shop API

Technical Prerequisites;

Date Handling

Managing Languages

Best Practices for Error Handling in External System

How Testing callback response

Best Practices for delopers

API Best Practices

When integrating with this API suite, following best practices will help ensure stability, performance, and security of your applications. Below are recommended guidelines to consider during development:

1. Implement throttling or use exponential backoff for rate limits

APIs may reject requests if too many are sent in a short period (HTTP 429 Too Many Requests).
To prevent service disruption:

Apply throttling in your client so you don’t exceed expected request volumes.

Use exponential backoff strategies when retrying failed requests (e.g., wait 1s, 2s, 4s, 8s…). Adding random jitter prevents multiple clients from retrying simultaneously.

This ensures fair API usage and reduces the chance of hitting rate limits.

DANGER

It is mandatory for integrators to handle these rate limits.

2. Use pagination for large datasets

When working with endpoints that return large result sets:

Always request data in pages using limit and offset, or cursor-based pagination when available.

Avoid fetching huge datasets in a single call, which may cause timeouts or memory issues on the client side.

Efficient pagination improves response times and reduces load on both server and client.

3. Verify record existence before creating new contacts

Before creating a new resource (e.g., a contact), check if it already exists by querying unique identifiers (email, phone, external ID, etc.).

Prevents duplicate entries in the database.

Reduces overhead when cleaning and reconciling records later.

This practice keeps data integrity and ensures more accurate reporting.

4. Store the API Key securely

API keys are sensitive credentials:

Never expose them in frontend code (JavaScript running in browsers or mobile apps).

Store keys in environment variables or secure secrets managers.

Rotate keys periodically and revoke unused ones.

This protects your system from unauthorized access.

5. Centralize API calls in a wrapper or service module

Instead of scattering raw API calls throughout your application:

Build a wrapper module/service to encapsulate API logic.

Centralize handling of logging, authentication, error management, and retries.

Makes future changes (e.g., new API version, modified endpoints) much easier to implement.

This reduces duplication and enforces consistent practices across your codebase.

6. Track API calls for debugging and auditing

Maintain logs of API requests and responses, at least for:

Endpoint called

Payload sent

Response status and body

Timestamps

This helps with debugging issues, understanding client behavior, and supporting audits if needed.

7. Test in sandbox or with dummy data before production

Always validate your integration in a sandbox environment or using test data before executing on production.

Prevents accidental data corruption.

Provides a safe space to experiment with error handling and performance testing.

Once tested, you can confidently deploy changes to production.

✅ Following these practices helps developers build integrations that are resilient, secure, and scalable, reducing maintenance overhead and improving long-term system reliability.

Before start develop

Before You Start#

API Best Practices#

1. Implement throttling or use exponential backoff for rate limits#

2. Use pagination for large datasets#

3. Verify record existence before creating new contacts#

4. Store the API Key securely#

5. Centralize API calls in a wrapper or service module#

6. Track API calls for debugging and auditing#

7. Test in sandbox or with dummy data before production#

Before You Start

API Best Practices

1. Implement throttling or use exponential backoff for rate limits

2. Use pagination for large datasets

3. Verify record existence before creating new contacts

4. Store the API Key securely

5. Centralize API calls in a wrapper or service module

6. Track API calls for debugging and auditing

7. Test in sandbox or with dummy data before production