API Overview

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The Partner API is how you onboard merchants and orchestrate connect flows from your backend. It covers merchant lifecycle and connection state — not catalog editing, feed management, or credential handling. Channel3 runs those pipelines; the API is the control plane for getting merchants in and reading status out.

Use it server-side only. For day-to-day ops — browsing catalogs, debugging sync issues, reporting performance — use the Observability dashboard.

What you can do

Onboard merchants

Register a merchant when they sign up or link a store. Channel3 assigns a stable customer_id, attaches them to your partner account, and starts baseline ingestion immediately — no connect flow required.

Launch hosted connect

Mint a short-lived, co-branded connect URL when a merchant is ready to link import sources (Shopify, WooCommerce, Akeneo, etc.) or distribution destinations (Google, Microsoft, OpenAI).

Read connection state

After a merchant returns from connect — or any time you need status — fetch import sources, destinations, and per-connection sync state for that customer.

List your portfolio

Paginate through every merchant you have provisioned, with customer_id, name, and logo — useful for reconciliation, support tooling, or syncing your own customer records.

Endpoints

Each maps to one job in the integration. See the Quickstart for the full four-step flow.

EndpointWhen to call it
Create merchantCustomer signs up or you learn their storefront domain. Idempotent on domain — safe to retry. Returns customer_id.
Create connect sessionMerchant clicks Connect in your product. Returns a single-use hosted page URL (expires in 30 minutes). Mint a fresh session for every attempt.
List connectionsAfter redirect to your redirect_uri, or when polling sync progress. Source of truth for connection and sync state — do not rely on callback query params alone.
List merchantsAudit or sync your managed merchant list. Paginated (page, size).

What happens on provision

Calling Create merchant is enough to start work: Channel3 activates a web_crawl connection automatically and begins crawling the storefront with no merchant action.

Connect sessions are for additional import sources and distribution destinations beyond that baseline.

Authentication

Authenticate with your partner secret key (c3_sk_...) in the x-api-key header on every request.

$curl https://partners.trychannel3.com/v0/partner/merchants \
>  -H "x-api-key: c3_sk_..."

Base URL: https://partners.trychannel3.com/v0

Never expose the key in a browser, mobile app, or client-side code. All Partner API calls belong on your server.

Your key is issued once during partner onboarding. Contact support@trychannel3.com to rotate keys or register additional redirect URIs.

What the API does not cover

The API is intentionally small. These stay on Channel3:

  • Connect UI — OAuth, app installs, credential collection, and multi-step platform flows run on the hosted connect page.
  • Catalog data — product records, attributes, and normalization are in the pipeline and Observability dashboard, not exposed as partner API resources.
  • Feed delivery — Channel3 generates and syncs feeds to each destination; you read status via List connections.

If you need hands-on visibility for white-glove support, use the dashboard. If you need programmatic status for your own UI, use List connections.

Next steps

Quickstart

Walk through provision → connect session → redirect → callback with example calls.

API Explorer

Schemas, error responses, and try-it-now requests on each endpoint in the reference below.