specification: API Commons Rate Limits
specificationVersion: '0.1'
schema: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/interface-research/main/schema/api-commons.yml#/$defs/RateLimits
provider: Best Buy
providerId: best-buy
created: '2026-05-04'
generated: '2026-08-27'
method: searched
source: https://developer.bestbuy.com/legal
modified: '2026-08-27'
reconciled: true
tags:
- Rate Limiting
- Retail
- Quota
description: >-
  Best Buy publishes hard numeric API limits in its Terms and Conditions at
  developer.bestbuy.com/legal: 50,000 calls per day and 5 calls per second, applying to the
  Products, Reviews, Stores, Categories, Recommendations and Buying Options endpoints.
  Exceeding either limit returns HTTP 403 (not 429) and triggers an email notification to the
  key holder. The API returns NO rate-limit response headers, so an agent has no runtime signal
  and must count its own requests — the 403 it receives on exhaustion is indistinguishable in
  shape from the 403 returned for an invalid API key.
sources:
- https://developer.bestbuy.com/legal
- https://bestbuyapis.github.io/api-documentation/#user-guide
limit_count: 2
headers:
  rateLimitLimit: null
  rateLimitRemaining: null
  rateLimitReset: null
  retryAfter: null
  note: >-
    No X-RateLimit-*, RateLimit-* or Retry-After header is documented, and none could be
    observed anonymously — api.bestbuy.com returns the same 403 to every keyless request.
responseCodes:
  throttled: 403
  note: >-
    Best Buy overloads 403 for both "invalid API key" and "exceeded call limit". The
    documentation's own status table lists 403 as "Invalid API key or exceeded call limit".
limits:
- name: Daily call quota
  scope: per-key
  metric: requests
  window: day
  limit: 50000
  burst: null
  applies_to:
  - Products API
  - Reviews
  - Stores API
  - Categories API
  - Recommendations API
  - Buying Options (Open Box) API
  on_exhaustion: HTTP 403 plus an email notification to the registered key holder
  source: https://developer.bestbuy.com/legal
- name: Per-second call rate
  scope: per-key
  metric: requests
  window: second
  limit: 5
  burst: null
  applies_to:
  - Products API
  - Reviews
  - Stores API
  - Categories API
  - Recommendations API
  - Buying Options (Open Box) API
  on_exhaustion: HTTP 403 ("Query Per Second" / QPS error)
  source: https://developer.bestbuy.com/legal
guidance:
- The documentation recommends the `in(...)` operator for batching lookups specifically to stay under the per-second QPS ceiling rather than issuing one request per SKU.
- The Buying Options API supports batch queries of up to 100 SKUs in one call, which is the intended way to stay inside 5 rps.
- Terms also cap caching of returned Content at 72 hours, which bounds how far a consumer can amortise the quota.