Pull distributor pricing into your own systems with the API

If your shop has a website, a POS that can call out, or a spreadsheet someone keeps by hand, you've probably wished it knew what the distributors have. The API gives it that. Send a UPC and get back price and stock from every distributor we sync.

API access is included with Pro and Pro+.

What you get per plan

• Pro: 20,000 calls a month, up to 60 a minute
• Pro+: 50,000 calls a month, up to 180 a minute

It's the same API on both plans. Pro+ just gets more calls.

The monthly count resets at the start of each calendar month. One lookup is one call, however many distributors come back.

Get a key

Go to Settings and open the API Tokens tab. Click Create API Key, give it a name you'll recognize later ("Website", "POS", "Test"), and choose when it expires. It can be never, 7, 30, 60 or 90 days, or a year.

Your key is shown once. Copy it somewhere safe before you close the window. We only store a fingerprint of it, so we can't show it to you again. If you lose it, Regenerate API Key gives you a new one, and Revoke API Key kills it.

Treat it like a password. Anyone with the key uses your quota.

Make a call

There's one endpoint. Pass a UPC and your key in the Authorization header:

curl "https://projectparabellum.com/api/search?upc=UPC_HERE" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"

You get back JSON with one entry per distributor listing that UPC. Each entry has the price, the quantity on hand, whether the listing is active, the distributor's SKU, the product title, manufacturer, model and part number, and when that row last changed. Each distributor is identified by an ID.

What the prices are

These are the prices distributors publish to us through their standard feeds. They're the same numbers you'd see in search before connecting any distributor logins.

They are not your negotiated dealer pricing. If you've connected your own login with a distributor that only shares pricing with its own account holders, the API will return that distributor's price and stock for your key. Otherwise those distributors come back with price, quantity and SKU left empty. Here's why some distributors work that way.

When you hit a limit

Two limits, two responses, both HTTP 429.

• Too many calls in a minute returns "Rate limit exceeded" with a Retry-After: 60 header. Wait a minute and carry on.
• Over your monthly quota returns "Monthly API quota exceeded", with how many calls you've used and your limit.

Other errors you'll see are 401 for a missing, wrong, revoked or expired key, and 400 if you forget the upc parameter.

If you're building something that loops over your whole catalog, space your calls out to stay under the per-minute limit. Cache what you've fetched, too. Distributor prices don't change every few seconds, and most of our feeds sync between every 15 minutes and every few hours.

Need more than your quota?

Your quota and usage are on the API Tokens tab under Monthly API Quota.

If you regularly need more calls than your plan includes, get in touch. We can switch on overage billing for your account at $2 per 1,000 calls over your quota, billed on top of your plan. It comes with spending limits. You get an email when you pass a warning amount, and you can set a hard cap where calls stop, so you can't run up a surprise bill.

Try it

API access is included with Pro and Pro+. Create a key on the API Tokens tab and try one UPC from the command line before you wire it into anything.

Not a member yet? Try the full Pro+ plan free for 7 days. No credit card needed until your trial ends.