Catalog Service Integration with API Mesh Simplified

January 2023 also brought news of simplified Catalog Service integration via API Mesh. Previously, merchants using Catalog Service for headless or composable storefronts had to manage separate API credentials, rate-limiting, and data transformation logic. With API Mesh support, integration is now declarative and integrated into a single gateway.

What is Catalog Service?

Catalog Service is Adobe's GraphQL endpoint for product catalogs, optimized for headless commerce. It exposes product details, categories, search, filtering and inventory data with lightning-fast response times far quicker than querying the monolithic Adobe Commerce GraphQL API directly. It scales independently, handles traffic spikes gracefully, and integrates with in-store search and personalization.

The Integration Challenge

Before API Mesh integration, accessing Catalog Service required separate credentials, manual data transformation, rate limiting implementation, and separate monitoring. API Mesh now acts as a unified gateway for Catalog Service, allowing merchants to use declarative configuration, apply transformations at the gateway level, benefit from built-in rate limiting and caching, and centralize authentication management.

Technical Benefits

By routing Catalog Service through API Mesh, merchants gain a single pane of glass for monitoring all API traffic, consistent error handling, schema stitching capabilities, and request/response logging for debugging and compliance auditing.

Storefront Implications

For storefront developers, the improvement is immediate: simpler SDKs with fewer authentication concerns, faster queries through gateway-level caching, better error messages meaningful to frontend developers, and transparent rate limiting.

Migration and Adoption

Adobe provided step-by-step guidance for merchants to expose Catalog Service through API Mesh. The process involves defining the endpoint in mesh configuration, writing resolvers to transform responses if needed, testing in non-production, and switching storefront clients to the mesh endpoint. Most migrations take less than a week with zero downtime.

Looking Forward

This announcement reflects Adobe's strategy: reduce friction for merchants building composable, API-first storefronts. By making Catalog Service a first-class citizen in API Mesh, Adobe is signalling that headless commerce is a core pillar of the platform's future. For merchants committed to composable architectures, this is one less integration headache and one step closer to a unified, extensible commerce platform.