Overview

The Bold Checkout APIs give you full control of your checkout. Use the APIs to customize the look and feel of your checkout to align with your brand, extend Bold Checkout's capabilities, and remove the friction from your customers’ checkout experience.

Checkout flows

Bold Checkout is designed around checkout flows (Patent Pending): optimized checkout experiences individually designed to serve a specific set of shoppers based user-defined criteria, such as the device they're using, their screen size, or the items in their cart.

Checkout flows fall broadly into two categories:

• Bold-hosted flows are built and hosted by Bold. These flows can be used without any development work.

  note

  Bold currently supports the use of only one Bold-hosted flow at a time.

• Self-hosted flows are built and hosted by the merchant (or a merchant vendor). These flows can either have completely custom frontends, or they can take advantage of the Checkout Experience Templates. Bold supports the use of any number of self-hosted flows at a time. For more information, refer to Create a Self-Hosted Checkout-Flow.

• Partner flows are built by one of Bold's partners. These flows are often intended for a specific platform, technology partner, or other use case.

For more information about flows and their components, refer to the conceptual Checkout flows page.

Bold Checkout APIs

Bold offers a series of OpenAPI specifications that reflect our API capabilities:

API	Authentication method	Description
Checkout Backend API	API access token	Performs tasks such as initializing an order, adding an authenticated customer, and capturing payments.
Checkout Frontend API	JSON web token (JWT)	Performs user-driven functions, such as adding and editing cart line items, editing billing and shipping addresses, and choosing a shipping method.
Checkout Admin API	API access token	Configures store-level settings, including overrides and external payment gateways.

Bold provides several other non-OpenAPI specifications, which outline the requests and responses of custom interfaces between a client and Bold:

• Payment Isolation Gateway Interface (PIGI) API — The interface that a customer uses to input their payment information and add the payment method to an order. PIGI isolates customer payment information from everything else that happens during a checkout experience. This separation increases the security of the customer’s payment information by preventing any third party scripts from having access to information shoppers input into the payment fields.
• External Payment Gateway Connector API and External Payment Gateway Actions and Events — The interfaces that Bold uses to communicate with an external payment gateway that is not already officially supported by Bold.

note

The content in this section of the Developer Documentation applies only to Bold Checkout APIs (called Bold Cashier on Shopify) that access https://api.boldcommerce.com. The same applies to the Checkout Backend and Checkout Frontend API specifications.

If you are looking for earlier versions of the Bold Checkout APIs, which access cashier.boldcommerce.com, refer to the Bold Cashier API.

Extending Bold Checkout

You can use the Bold Checkout APIs to change and extend Checkout using integrations. You can create two types of integrations — private and public — which are discussed in the following table:

Integration type	Private Integration	Public Integration
Best used for	Creating a self-hosted checkout flow or a custom integration that you want to install on one or two stores.	Creating a generally available integration that you anticipate being installed on many stores.
Authentication method	API access token obtained via Bold Account Center.	API access token obtained via an OAuth 2.0 flow.
Installation method	Manually installed on each store.	Installed via the Integration Marketplace in Bold Account Center.
Get started	Quick Start	Build Public Integrations

Getting started

Ready to jump in? The Checkout Getting Started page gives you everything you need to know to begin using Bold APIs.