Integrate products from Supplier API

Retired Boards Appdev Merchandising

Topic summary

Goal: Connect a supplier’s API (JSON/XML) to Shopify so product changes auto-sync to the store and apply markups on import.

Proposed approach: Build a middleware service that:

  • Fetches supplier data (prefer JSON over XML), authenticates, and normalizes it to Shopify’s Product model.
  • Transforms data (e.g., price markup) and pushes it to Shopify via Admin REST API endpoints for creating/updating products. Notes: handle Shopify API rate limits; any language capable of HTTP/JSON (Python/Node/Ruby) works.

Resources shared: Links to Shopify Admin REST Product resource (create/update) and rate limit docs. JSON parsing examples mentioned (json.loads/JSON.parse).

Requests/next steps: OP will try the middleware approach. Several users asked for developer help; guidance given to hire via the Shopify Partner Directory. A vendor offered services.

Open questions (unanswered):

  • Bidirectional flow (Shop → Supplier): sending orders/customer data. Whether to use webhooks (event-driven triggers on new orders) versus polling via cron jobs remains unconfirmed in-thread.
  • Learning resources specifically on “creating middleware” were requested.

Status: No final implementation details; discussion remains open.

Summarized with AI on December 25. AI used: gpt-5.
2

Hi GeorgeCha,

Great to hear you’re looking to integrate your store with a suppliers API. You can achieve this workflow by implementing middleware that connects the supplier’s API with your Shopify store. Here’s a general approach:

  1. Fetch the Data from the Supplier’s API:

First, you would write a script that pulls the JSON data from the supplier’s API. This script would need to authenticate with the supplier’s API, fetch the data, and then convert it into a format that can be used by Shopify. XML is less supported by Shopify, so if you can use just JSON that will make things easier for you.

  1. Parse and Transform the Data:

Once you’ve fetched the data, you can parse it and transform it into a format that Shopify can understand, eg: use a function like json.loads() in Python or JSON.parse() in JavaScript to turn the JSON string into a data structure you can work with. These are the properties that are accessible with the Product resource, to give you a model of how data could be structured so it’s compatible with Shopify’s Admin API.

  1. Push the Data to Shopify:

After you’ve transformed the data, you would push it to your Shopify store using Shopify’s API. Check out our documentation on API endpoints for creating and updating products, which you can use for this part of the process.

This approach could be implemented in any programming language that can make HTTP requests and process JSON or XML data. Python, Node.js, Ruby, etc., could all be used for this purpose.

One important thing to note is that Shopify throttles API requests depending on the API you’re using, so you may need to rate limit your requests to avoid exceeding Shopify’s API limits.

Hope this helps!

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