Caching E-Commerce Data for The Web

The Square Online catalog service provides all the catalog data for the websites we power. This includes products, categories of products, store locations, and many others.

While some catalog data is fairly simple to present in an API response, other parts are more costly to calculate. The price of a product, for example, comes from many sources: SKUs (think a Small vs. Large shirt), modifiers (would you like cheese on your burger?), and location-based pricing, which gives sellers the ability to set different prices at different locations.

As we continue to add more controls to how merchants sell and price their products, response times for what was initially a simple API have been steadily increasing. To help the clients get all the data needed in a single request, we allow inclusion of related data on most endpoints. For example if you wanted to get a list of all products including images, variations, modifiers, locations, and categories, we can craft a query string on our product endpoint that looks like:

In spring of 2019, retrieving a list of products from the products endpoint could take anywhere between 200ms and 500ms. This was barely okay, but clearly couldn’t support our future plans and additional features.

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