How to use External API via json with Webflow CMS

[jasondark]

@justincase

(1) Is there a link somewhere for how I would access the Webflow CMS API to potentially try do it that way?

https://developers.webflow.com/ but you’ll need to be able to write code. Also the Webflow CMS API is pretty bad to work with.

@justincase

(2)I found a great resource on another thread that uses Airtable to update the CMS – is similar to what you are suggesting with Zapier/Integromat? I successfully pulled my product data into Airtable last night (it looks beautiful!) and the tool the other thread talked about looks like it will be great to bring into the CMS.

You can use a tool like Zapier to send data from the CMS to Airtable or vice-versa.

@justincase

(3) But, I’m struggling on what direction to take for a user to build a shopping cart. The ecommerce provider we’re working with will actually handle the “checkout” but I struggle to understand what I need to do on our front end build for a user to build a shopping cart and then have that data be sent to the ecommerce provider’s website to complete the order. Is this where I would send the mutations to the GraphQL API directly from the Webflow CMS API somehow?

The CMS API (or Zapier which uses it) only allows you to access CMS data which isn’t going to help you hit the ecommerce providers endpoint to place the order. This would need to run in a script on the front end (aka the user’s browser) after the page has loaded. Without knowing the details of your project it sounds like you will need a script that sends a user’s order details to an endpoint provided by your ecommerce provider. I have never sent GraphQL mutations from a Webflow site so am not sure what is involved in making that work. I’m sure it’s possible but for something like this it’s likely that using a http endpoint would be simpler to set up.

If you don’t really know what you’re doing then I would suggest working with @foxy as they specialise in Webflow ecommerce integrations and are great to work with.