There are many ways to use our API at e-conomic. We have gone to great lengths to create a flexible API that caters to many different workflows. But with so many different ways to use an API, the risk of choosing a wrong path is greater. Choosing the wrong strategy for your integration can have a considerable performance impact on your integration.

A general guideline is that, if your use of the API is really chatty, then you have chosen a wrong path. This not only impacts your performance, but also the general performance of e-conomic. That’s why we monitor our integrations and when we see certain agreements or integrations with an increased amount of traffic we contact them and help them bring down the amount of traffic resulting in less strain on our servers and faster third party integrations.

While this has been our practice for many years, we have now chosen to formalize our fair usage policy. This policy puts a 50k cap on API calls made by an integration. Read the policy here.

How do you spot a chatty integration?
Our SOAP API is the easiest of our APIs to use the wrong way. The SOAP API offers methods to get or set individual properties. While this can reduce the bandwidth usage of an integration if used right it can also do the exact opposite if used incorrectly. So if your integration makes use of a lot of individual getter and setter methods chances are you are doing it wrong. Even if you use the GetData methods there might be improvements to be had by using our GetDataArray methods. You should make use of a tool like Fiddler (http://www.telerik.com/download/fiddler) to inspect your traffic.

If you are using our .NET SDK, you should make sure that you are using the latest version or even better stop using it and start connecting to SOAP directly. We have deprecated the .NET SDK partly because it is difficult to tell if you are doing things wrong. You should be using the Data classes in the SDK as much as possible. The latest SDK includes a number of improvements, that remove a number of unnecessary round-trips to our servers. So simply updating the SDK binaries should get some of the way.

Can I get a little help please?
Yes you can! We can tell you a lot about your integration by looking at our logs. So if you want to validate your integration feel free to ask us at api@e-conomic.com. We’ll let you know if we see something that can be done better.

So bottom line is that the main purpose of our newly formalized fair usage policy is to ensure that ours and your customers get the best experience they can get.

We are curently going through an initial list of integration partners who do not adhere to this policy and contacting each of them, to let them know what they can do to improve their integration.