Overview

Introduction to Rewardful's REST API

The Rewardful API is organized around REST. Our API has predictable resource-oriented URLs, accepts form-encoded request bodies, returns JSON-encoded responses, and uses standard HTTP response codes, authentication, and verbs.

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Authentication

All API requests require authentication with HTTP Basic Auth, similar to how Stripe authenticates. Provide your API Secret as the basic auth username value. You do not need to provide a password.

curl https://api.getrewardful.com/v1/affiliates/7B016217-18AF-44DD-A30C-0DE0C1534D2A \
  -u YOUR_API_SECRET:

Be sure to replace YOUR_API_SECRET with your actual API Secret. For example, if your API secret was ABC123, the curl command to fetch all affiliates would be:

curl --request GET \
  --url https://api.getrewardful.com/v1/affiliates \
  -u ABC123:

Your API Secret can be found on the Company Settings page.

Keep your API Secret safe!

Your API Secret grants full access to your Rewardful account. Do not:

• Share your API Secret with third parties

• Commit your API Secret to version control (i.e. Git)

• Share your API Secret over email or chat

• Send your API Secret to the web browser in HTML or JavaScript

Contact us as soon as possible if you believe your API Secret has been compromised so we can rotate it for you.

Request and Response Formats

Rewardful will provide a JSON-based REST API through which merchants can create affiliate accounts and fetch data for reporting. Endpoints accept form-encoded request bodies and return JSON-encoded responses.

Rewardful uses UUID strings for primary keys (IDs) for all resources. If you plan to store Rewardful IDs in your database, make sure to use a column type (string, UUID, etc) appropriate for your database engine.

Dates and times in the Rewardful API are represented as ISO 8601 formatted strings.

Errors

Missing or invalid authorization will return a 401 Unauthorized JSON response:

{  "error": "Invalid API Secret." }

Requesting a nonexistent object will return a 404 Not Found JSON response:

{  "error": "Affiliate not found: " }

Passing invalid data to a create/update endpoint will return a 422 Unprocessable Entity JSON response:

{
  "error": "Could not create affiliate.",
  "details": ["Email can't be blank"]
}

Pagination

API endpoints that return a list of objects include pagination, unless noted otherwise. The data structure has two root objects:

Key	Description
pagination	Pagination data, such as current/next/previous page numbers, counts, etc.
data	An array of objects returned for the specified page number.

The `pagination` object

Key	Description
previous_page	Previous page number. Will be null if there's no previous page.
current_page	Current page number.
next_page	Next page number. Will be null if there's no next page.
count	The number of objects on this page.
limit	The requested number of objects per page.
total_pages	The total number of pages.
total_count	The total number of objects returned across all pages.

Example

This example demonstrates the pagination for a collection of 150 objects in total, split into 3 pages of 50 objects per page:

{
  "pagination": {
    "previous_page": 1,
    "current_page": 2,
    "next_page": 3,
    "count": 50,
    "limit": 50,
    "total_pages": 3,
    "total_count": 150
  },
  "data": [
    // Array of objects
  ]
}

Expanding objects

Many objects allow you to request additional information as an expanded response by using the expand request parameter. You can use expand to expand a single type of object, or expand[] to expand multiple types of objects.

The documentation for each endpoint will list which objects are expandable (if any) for that endpoint.

For example, to expand an affiliate you would prepend this query string parameter to the request URL:

?expand=affiliate

To expand both affiliate and sale objects, prepend this query string parameter to the request URL:

?expand[]=affiliate&expand=sale

Rate limits

The Rewardful REST API uses rate limiting to help maximize its uptime and stability. Users who send many requests in quick succession may see error responses that show up as HTTP status code 429. These 429 responses will include RateLimit header fields which you can use to gracefully handle failures and retry requests when your quota resets.

In most cases the API rate limit is 45 requests per 30 second window. Please treat these limits as absolute maximums and do not generate unnecessary load.

If you plan to run a batch script (such as programmatically creating many affiliates via API), please throttle your API usage by adding sleep/delay mechanisms to your script. We may reduce limits at any time to prevent abuse.