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Retail & E-Commerce

Expose catalog, orders, and inventory APIs to apps and partners with rate limits, caching, and usage visibility.

Practical use cases

Concrete ways teams use Zerq for this scenario.

  • Let marketplaces and dropship partners sync catalog and orders

    Each partner gets access to the products they need (e.g. catalog read, order write) with their own rate limits. You avoid one partner overloading your systems; you see usage per partner for capacity and SLA discussions.

  • Reduce load on your PIM or OMS with caching

    Catalog and inventory read traffic can be cached at the gateway so repeated requests don’t hit your backend every time. You control cache rules per endpoint; writes and critical paths stay real-time.

  • Scale through Black Friday without a single point of failure

    The gateway scales horizontally with multiple replicas; you roll out updates with zero downtime. Duplicate-request protection and idempotency keep order and inventory updates safe under retries and spikes.

Outcomes

  • Scalable partner API layer with predictable limits and visibility.
  • Reduced backend load via caching and duplicate protection.
  • Better observability for capacity planning and partner support.

How Zerq helps

  • API products and per-partner access: assign catalog, orders, and inventory to different products and partners with separate rate limits.
  • Optional response caching to reduce load on catalog/inventory backends; duplicate request protection for idempotent writes.
  • Workflow designer for routing and transformation: route by path or header (e.g. partner ID); optional code node for custom mapping.
  • Prometheus and structured logs: volume, latency, errors by product and partner; dashboards for capacity and partner SLAs.
  • Developer portal: partners get self-service keys, docs, and try-it; they only see the APIs they are allowed to use.
  • Multi-replica scaling and zero-downtime updates so gateway keeps up with peak (e.g. Black Friday) without single-point failure.
For architects & evaluators (technical context, requirements)

Technical context

Retail and e-commerce platforms expose catalog, inventory, and order APIs to marketplaces, dropship partners, and internal apps. Requirements include real-time or near-real-time sync, rate limiting per partner to protect backends, batch vs synchronous patterns (bulk inventory/orders vs single-item updates), and clear separation of commerce APIs from payments/shipping. Observability for capacity planning and partner-specific usage is essential.

Technical requirements

  • Per-partner rate limits and quotas; optional caching for catalog and inventory reads.
  • Support for both synchronous and batch-style traffic; idempotency for order and inventory updates.
  • Partner-specific products and scopes (e.g. catalog vs orders vs inventory).
  • Metrics and logs by partner and endpoint for capacity and SLA monitoring.
  • Stable API contract while backends (e.g. PIM, OMS) change; routing and optional transformation.

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