Overview
Home Improvement have a large product hierachy and to make navigating this easier Backyard API provides the Categories API to allow you to retrieve category_id values for different levels of the Home Improvement hierarchy.
category_id values returned by the Categories API can be used in subsequent category API requests to show category listings from the given category.
This is useful for use-cases such as "iterating all of the products in a category".
Whilst most of the time the category_id 's returned by the Categories API are "static", it's expected that Home Improvement's category hierarchy will change over time. Backyard API continuously updates the Categories API dataset to capture these changes. It's advised that, if your code relies on showing the category hierarchy to users, you periodically refresh your cached hierarchy from the Categories API.
Categories API Cost & Rate Limits Each request to the Categories API counts against your monthly request quota so it's recommended that you cache the Categories API response locally and use your local copy for lookups within your app.
The Categories API has a rate limit of 2000 requests per minute.
As well as interacting with the Categories API programmatically Backyard API provides a visual categories browser on the Dashboard, as shown below. You can use this to visually explore the Home Improvement hierarchy and generate sample category API requests.
You can browse the category hierarchy visually using the categories browser.
Next Steps Listing & Searching Categories