How do I integrate with Bolt Checkout Everywhere?
Catalog and order integrations enable you to manage products and orders from Bolt Checkout Everywhere using your normal workflow, whether that involves another ecommerce platform or not.
Integration types
Bolt offers various types of integrations to populate products into the Checkout Everywhere catalog as well as place orders into your backend.
| Integration type | Description | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Plug-in API | The merchant creates a custom API and sends Bolt the API keys. | Merchants who use Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, SalesForce Commerce Cloud or Shopware as an ecommerce platform |
| Automatic (touchless) | Bolt uses crawler and checkout bots to get product data and place orders on your site. Optionally, replace the product crawler bot with a Plug-in API. | Merchants that partner with Bolt via an affiliate network or are not on a plug-in supported platform, but a catalog big enough to exclude a manual integration |
| Manual | The merchant directly uploads products and fulfills orders in the Merchant Portal. There is minimal integration needed because the merchant does not use several systems. | Merchants with a small catalog selection and/or that request a high level of editing access. |
| Custom API | Customized implementation via API | Merchants with large product catalogs, complex backend configuration, or bespoke platforms |
In addition, it may be possible to use a hybrid approach for your implementation. For example, if you love the order fulfillment workflow of your ecommerce platform, you could use an automatic integration for product synchronization and a plug-in API approach to order management. Bolt will help you select an integration method during onboarding.
Automatic (Touchless)
Inventory Integration
Bolt’s crawler bots regularly check your web shop and update the Checkout Everywhere product catalog with any changes.
If a shopper finds your product on a publisher’s site, Bolt validates that the item is in stock and confirms the correct price before making it available for checkout in the publisher.
Order Integration
When a customer places an order, Bolt’s checkout bots synchronize the order information between your web shop/cart platform and the Checkout Everywhere Merchant Portal.
This diagram describes how Bolt’s bots interact with the purchasing flow:
Plug-in API
The plug-in API method also automatically pulls product and order information between systems, but it does so without using crawler and checkout bots. Bolt Checkout Everywhere has built plug-in APIs for several of the most popular e-commerce platforms:
- Shopify
- WooCommerce
- Shopware
- Adobe Commerce (Magento)
- SalesForce Commerce Cloud
Manual product data and order management
If you don’t need to integrate Bolt with another system, you can manually manage products and orders from the Bolt Checkout Everywhere Merchant Portal.
Directly upload products and fulfill orders on the Checkout Everywhere Merchant Portal without any synchronization from your web shop.
Learn more:
Custom API
Large, complex, or bespoke systems can require a more flexible integration to work seamlessly with Bolt. Refer to the Checkout Everywhere REST API documentation for more information.
Live Update
To keep stock count , availability and prices as accurate as possible, Bolt has implemented the possibility to check this data on the fly, e.g. as soon as a visitor requests this data in the frontend, or when the shopping cart is loaded. This way Bolt prevents selling products that are out of stock.
Ensuring Product Quality
The better the quality of your products, the higher the chance of selling the products. Here are some tips:
- Make sure that we can match variants. item_group_id field should have the same value for product with variants. Product with variants is the same product in multiple sizes, colors etc. All clothing should have the size attribute. The same attribute should have unique value among other variants.
- Images should be of good quality and the more of them, the better. A minimum for good product is three images (image_link, additional_image_link fields).
- Description should be detailed and contain all the information customer might be interested in.
- Include delivery time in your feed or inform us what’s the default delivery time for all your orders.
- Items with free shipping sell best, consider it (shipping field).
- Include google product category in the feed, so we can make your product searchable easier (
google\_product\_categoryfield). - Include GTIN number (gtin field).
- Take good care of the availability of your products, make sure to inform us about the stock count (quantity field).
- If the product is targeted to specific gender, add this information in the feed (gender field)