Getting started
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. Checkout flows are 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 are built and hosted by Bold. These flows can be used without any development work. Bold currently supports the use of only one Bold-hosted flow at a time.
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:
- Secure Payments Interface API — The interface that a customer uses to input their payment information and add the payment method to an order. The SPI 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.
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, external payment gateways, or platform connectors. Refer to Extend Bold Checkout for more information about the various ways that you can integrate different technologies into Bold Checkout.