Frequent Gift Card API Errors

Questions
1

Merchants using our ecommerce web app have had multiple customers complain that they cannot use or even view their gift cards. I am unable to reproduce this problem in my test environments.

I have been looking through our error logs and I see the following errors related to Square’s Gift Cards API:

This merchant has exceeded the number of requests for this method, please try again later.
This application has exceeded the number of requests for this method, please try again later.

This is unacceptable to our merchants, so we need to try and get this resolved as soon as possible. My questions are as follows:

What are the rate limits for Gift Card related API calls?
What can be done so these rate limits are not exceeded, but our web app is still functional?
Can these rate limits be adjusted so the API will not fail and their customers can use their gift cards?

Thanks in advance.

1 Like
2

What endpoint are they getting this error with? Also what’s the application ID? :slightly_smiling_face:

3

Ah, I suppose those details would have been helpful. My apologies.

End point: /v2/gift-cards/from-gan
Application Id: sq0idp-tr_tPrBfDtx7EWVI5SAqVA

4

Thanks for the credentials. Square does have rate limits but we don’t document the limits. We encourage you to handle the limit gracefully by building a retry mechanism. This mechanism should have an exponential backoff schedule to reduce requests when volume is necessary. Also some randomness wouldn’t hurt to avoid a thundering herd effect. :slightly_smiling_face: