Rate limits

Information about the restrictions on the number of times a user or client can access Commerce Layer API endpoints within a specified period of time.

To protect our platform against API misuse or overuse and ensure the system is available for all our users we adopt a rate-limiting strategy, differentiated by environment (test or live), HTTP method, and types of resources involved.

IP addresses that exceed the following rates will be blocked until the frequency of the specific call drops below the allowed limit. Please note that the count on the number of requests is never reset: you must consider the time intervals as sliding time windows (that's why no X-Ratelimit-Reset header is included in the response).

If you're using Commerce Layer JS SDK to interact with our Core API you can leverage the SDK Utils library to execute several API calls to a resource endpoint in batch and make sure not to hit the current rate limits (see example).

Authentication endpoint

All the requests to the /oauth/token endpoint to get an access token to authenticate your API calls are never cached and are subject to stricter rate limits, regardless of the environment:

Environment	Max number of requests	Time window
Live, Test	30	1 min

Other endpoints

All the resources endpoint can be grouped into two main classes depending on whether they could be cached or not (cacheable or uncacheable). Two kinds of rate limits are applied to the IP with which you perform the calls to the /api/* endpoints:

• Average — the number of requests is calculated considering the sum of the requests sent to all the resource endpoints of the specific class in the related time window (e.g. you cannot send 400 live reqs to the /api/bundles endpoint, 400 live reqs to the /api/skus endpoint, and 400 live reqs to the /api/prices endpoint, all within the same 1-min window — because it would result in a total of 1200 reqs / 1 min).

• Burst — the number of requests is calculated on each single resource endpoint of the specific class (e.g. you can send 25 test reqs to the /api/addresses endpoint, 25 test reqs to the /api/orders endpoint, and 25 test reqs to the /api/line_items endpoint, all within the same 10-sec window)

GET requests

Read requests (performed via GET, HEAD, or OPTIONS HTTP methods) are subject to different rate limits based on the type of resource.

Cacheable

Please find below the list of cacheable resources. Read requests to the related endpoints are subject to the following rate limits:

Environment	Limit type	Max number of requests	Time window
Live	Average	1000 (to all endpoints)	1 min
Test	Average	500 (to all endpoints)	1 min
Live	Burst	250 (per endpoint)	10 secs
Test	Burst	125 (per endpoint)	10 secs

Cacheable resources list

• Bundles — /api/bundles

• Imports — /api/imports

• Markets — /api/markets

• Prices — /api/prices

• Price list — /api/price_lists

• Promotions — /api/promotions

• All types of promotions — /api/*_promotions

  • Buy X pay Y promotions — /api/buy_x_pay_y_promotions

  • External promotions — /api/external_promotions

  • Fixed amount promotions — /api/fixed_amount_promotions

  • Fixed price promotions — /api/fixed_price_promotions

  • Free gift promotions — /api/free_gift_promotions

  • Free shipping promotions — /api/free_shipping_promotions

  • Percentage discount promotions — /api/percentage_discount_promotions

• SKUs — /api/skus

• SKU options — /api/sku_options

• Stock items — /api/stock_items

• Stock locations — /api/stock_locations

Uncacheable

Read requests to all other endpoints (not listed above) are subject to the following rate limits:

Environment	Limit type	Max number of requests	Time window
Live	Average	200 (to all endpoints)	1 min
Test	Average	100 (to all endpoints)	1 min
Live	Burst	50 (per endpoint)	10 secs
Test	Burst	25 (per endpoint)	10 secs

POST and PATCH requests

Write requests (performed via POST or PATCH HTTP methods) to any endpoint (regardless of whether the related resource falls into the cacheable or uncacheable category) are subject to the following rate limits:

Environment	Limit type	Max number of requests	Time window
Live	Average	200 (to all endpoints)	1 min
Test	Average	100 (to all endpoints)	1 min
Live	Burst	50 (per endpoint)	10 secs
Test	Burst	25 (per endpoint)	10 secs

Response headers

You can get additional information you can use to avoid getting HTTP 429 Too many requests errors or to understand why your calls are being blocked by inspecting some specific headers included in the response:

Header	Description
X-Ratelimit-Limit	The maximum number of requests allowed in the sliding time window.
X-Ratelimit-Interval	The total duration of the sliding time window (in seconds).
X-Ratelimit-Remaining	The number of allowed requests remaining in the current time window (0 in case of HTTP 429 errors).

The information in the headers above (number of requests, time window duration, etc.) refers to the Average limit type only.