Retail and e-commerce is one of the largest verticals in the catalog — 325 providers — and one of the most layered. A modern store isn’t one platform anymore; it’s a stack of composable APIs for catalog, checkout, payments, fulfillment, search, and support. The catalog is a good place to see how those layers have separated.
The bands
| Band | What it does | Providers on apis.io |
|---|---|---|
| Commerce platforms | Catalog, cart, checkout, orders | BigCommerce (65 APIs), VTEX (44), Spree Commerce (25) |
| Payments | Accept and settle money | Stripe (57), Square (37), Mercado Pago (29) |
| Marketplaces | Sell on someone else’s surface | eBay (27), Walmart (27), Rakuten (30) |
| Search & merchandising | Find and rank products | Coveo (31) |
| Fulfillment & support | Ship, return, resolve | DHL (48), HubSpot (63) |
What’s shifted recently
- Headless became the default contract shape. Platforms now ship a server-side management surface and a browser-safe storefront surface as separate APIs — BigCommerce and VTEX both do this. The monolithic “theme plus admin” store is the legacy pattern; the composable front end is the new one.
- Agentic checkout arrived through payments. The same Model Context Protocol push that hit fintech is reaching commerce — agents that browse a catalog and complete a purchase need the catalog, cart, and payment surfaces to be independently callable. The composable stack was already built for it.
- Search got pulled out of the platform. Dedicated search-and-merchandising APIs like Coveo now sit beside the commerce platform rather than inside it, because relevance is its own hard problem.
Where to start
- The Retail and E-commerce industry page ranks all 325 providers.
- For the platform decomposition, read the BigCommerce profile — 65 APIs split by trust boundary.
- For payments, Stripe (57 APIs) remains the reference fragmentation.
The takeaway
Retail is where “composable” stops being a buzzword and shows up as discrete contracts: catalog here, checkout there, payments from a third vendor, search from a fourth. The catalog’s structure mirrors the architecture — and the capability index lets you assemble the stack across vendors instead of betting everything on one suite.