Inventory & availability tracking API
An inventory and availability tracking API monitors whether products are in stock across marketplaces and sellers, in near real time. ShopAPIS powers it by returning the availability field — normalized to in_stock, out_of_stock, low_stock or preorder — together with seller, quantity_hint and fetched_at, across 70+ marketplaces in 30+ countries. You poll a product URL or identifier on a schedule; ShopAPIS reports the current stock state and flags the moment it changes.
Availability is a perishable signal — a competitor going out of stock is a pricing and demand opportunity that only matters if you detect it the same day, not next week. That is why inventory tracking is a polling problem, not a one-time lookup.
Fields that power inventory tracking
| Field | What it drives |
|---|---|
availability | Normalized stock status across every marketplace. |
seller | Which seller’s stock is being tracked — for multi-seller listings. |
buy_box_seller | Who owns the active offer when stock is shared across sellers. |
quantity_hint | Marketplace stock cues (e.g. “only 3 left”) when exposed. |
fetched_at | Timestamp for change detection and out-of-stock event logs. |
These are part of the 40+ field product object on the e-commerce data API pillar, so availability arrives with price and seller context for instant decisions.
Why an API beats DIY
Stock status is one of the most volatile fields on a listing and one of the most defended — marketplaces render it client-side, vary it by geo and seller, and rate-limit the frequent polling that change detection demands. Building it in-house means crawling thousands of SKUs every few hours through anti-bot stacks — tuned for an internet where bots reached roughly 51% of traffic in 2024 (Imperva 2025 Bad Bot Report) , so block rates run high — then normalizing wildly different “in stock” strings per site. ShopAPIS standardizes availability across every marketplace into four states and timestamps each check, so your replenishment and pricing systems consume reliable events instead of brittle crawler output. The polling and anti-bot detail is on the marketplace scraping API pillar.
Sample request and response
GET /v1/product?marketplace=shopee&country=ID&id=12345.67890&fields=availability,seller,buy_box_seller
Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY{
"marketplace": "shopee",
"country": "ID",
"product_id": "12345.67890",
"title": "Wireless Earbuds Pro",
"availability": "low_stock",
"quantity_hint": "Only 3 left",
"seller": "AudioWorld Official",
"buy_box_seller": "AudioWorld Official",
"price": 299000,
"currency": "IDR",
"previous_availability": "in_stock",
"changed": true,
"fetched_at": "2026-06-05T08:30:00Z"
}Use cases
- Out-of-stock alerting — fire an event the moment a SKU or competitor goes out of stock.
- Replenishment signals — feed
availabilityandquantity_hintinto demand forecasting. - Competitive opportunity — pair with price monitoring to capture demand when rivals stock out.
- Channel coverage — confirm your listings stay in stock across every marketplace and seller.