Glossary
Use this glossary when reading API references and building production data workflows.
Terms
API
Application Programming Interface. A defined contract for how software components exchange data. Happy Endpoint APIs use HTTP and return JSON.
Endpoint
A specific HTTP method and path that performs one operation, such as GET /search or GET /product-details.
OpenAPI
A machine-readable specification (formerly Swagger) that describes endpoints, parameters, request bodies, responses, and authentication for an HTTP API.
RapidAPI
The marketplace where Happy Endpoint APIs are listed, subscribed to, and authenticated. All billing, quota tracking, and key management happen through RapidAPI.
Rate limit
A ceiling on the number of requests your plan allows within a given time window. Exceeding the limit returns a 429 response.
Credit
A unit of API usage tracked by RapidAPI. Each plan includes a monthly credit allotment. One API call typically consumes one or more credits depending on the endpoint.
Quota
The total number of requests or credits available to your subscription in a billing period. Quotas reset monthly.
Backoff
A retry strategy that increases the wait time between attempts after each failure. Exponential backoff (e.g., 1s, 2s, 4s, 8s) prevents thundering-herd problems.
Pagination
A pattern for retrieving large datasets in pages. Endpoints that support pagination accept a page or offset parameter and return a total count alongside results.
Query parameter
A key-value pair appended to the URL after a ? character (e.g., ?query=chair&page=2). Most Happy Endpoint search endpoints use query parameters.
JSON
JavaScript Object Notation. The data format returned by all Happy Endpoint APIs. It is human-readable, widely supported, and easy to parse in any language.
Canonical URL
The authoritative URL for a resource. Used in HTTP redirects and HTML link tags to prevent duplicate content.