- Product feed APIaka: catalog feed, product data API
- A web API that shares your product catalog with other systems, instead of a static file. On Feedwyre it also handles writes and bookings, not just lookups and listings. So instead of emailing a spreadsheet or re-uploading a CSV, another system just calls an endpoint and gets whatever is true right now. See the Query API docs.
- Catalog API
- Another name for the same idea as a product feed API: an API that serves a business's product catalog to other systems, like a storefront, an app, or a marketplace integration. People use the two terms interchangeably almost everywhere, including on this site.
- Inventory API
- An API that shows stock levels, and - just as important - can safely reduce them as sales happen. Just showing stock numbers isn't enough to earn this name. It needs a write path that two sales can't race each other through. See atomic stock booking.
- Atomic stock booking
- A stock decrement done as one indivisible step: check there's enough left, then subtract it, with no gap in between where a second sale could sneak through. This is what makes overselling impossible by design, even when several channels sell the same item at the same moment. We walk through it in the multi-store case study.
- Overselling
- Selling more of a product than you actually have, usually because two sales channels each thought they still had the last one. It's the most common problem when inventory is spread across a website, an app, and a marketplace without one shared, safely-updated source of truth.
- Database sync
- Pulling product rows straight from a business's own database into a product feed, on a repeating schedule, using a read-only query and a column mapping. It's not a one-off import you have to remember to re-run. Feedwyre's version only ever adds or updates, and never deletes, even if a query briefly returns fewer rows than expected. See database sync docs.
- Child feedaka: margin feed, reseller feed
- A product feed that reads another feed's (its "parent's") products live and adds a price markup, either flat or per category, before handing them to a different audience with its own API keys. Distributors and wholesalers use this to give each business partner their own priced view of one underlying catalog, without keeping a second copy of the data anywhere. See the margin case study and child feed docs.
- Consumer
- The buyer a sale is booked against: a registered code for a storefront, a marketplace, or one specific business partner. It's not an individual shopper. You can lock an API key to just one consumer if you want, which keeps order tracking clean per channel or partner. See consumers & bookings.
- Consumer portalno API key, no spreadsheet
- A self-service login for a consumer with no API key and no code on their end. Set one up from the Consumers tab, choose which feeds they can see, and they sign in to their own portal on Feedwyre, browse the catalog and prices you've granted them, and book straight against your stock - using the same atomic stock booking as every other channel. It works just as well for an outside partner as it does for a branch or employee of a multi-location business booking from shared stock. See consumer portal docs.
- API key scope
- What a given key is allowed to do, in three tiers that each include everything the tier before it can do. Query is read-only. Query & Booking can also book a sale against a consumer. Manage is full access - create, update, delete, and bulk-update products too. Every key belongs to exactly one product feed. See the Manage API docs and consumers & bookings.
- Lookup & group fields
- A lookup field (SKU, barcode) is what a caller can look one exact product up by. It has to be unique per product. A group field (category, brand) defines what "a group" means when listing many products at once. You set both per product feed. See API configuration.
- Feed download linka secured, no-code alternative to the API
- A standing CSV, XLSX, or JSON link to a product feed's current data. It needs no API key and no integration work, which makes it handy for a partner who'd rather open a spreadsheet than build against an endpoint. You can scope a link to one consumer and revoke it on its own, and on a child feed it serves that consumer's own margin-priced numbers, exactly like an API key would. See download link docs.
- PIMproduct information management
- Software for centralizing and enriching product content, like descriptions, images, and translations, when many people need to contribute across many channels. A PIM and a product feed API solve related but different problems. A PIM manages how product data gets created and approved. A product feed API serves already-good data live, with access control and safe stock writes on top. Plenty of teams run both: a PIM upstream, feeding a product feed API like Feedwyre downstream.
See these terms in a real setup
Our case studies page walks through six real examples with diagrams: multi-store selling, per-partner margin pricing, wholesale portal access, multi-branch inventory, downloading one product feed in whichever format your systems need, and syncing a legacy database.
Read the case studies