Zinc

What It Does

Zinc is a unified e-commerce API that enables programmatic purchasing across thousands of retailers through a single integration. Instead of building and maintaining separate integrations for Amazon, Walmart, Target, Shopify stores, and countless other retailers, developers can search, buy, track, and process returns through one consistent API. The platform covers the entire purchasing lifecycle—from product discovery with live data, to checkout and order placement, to shipment tracking and returns processing.

Who It's For and What Problem It Solves

Zinc serves three primary audiences: AI agents that need to autonomously purchase products, developers building commerce applications, and businesses automating procurement workflows. For AI agents, Zinc enables one-shot purchases across 500M+ products with settlement in a single API call. Developers get a reliable, battle-tested infrastructure that eliminates fragile automations and handles every retailer's quirks automatically. Businesses can automate procurement while using their existing retailer accounts and negotiated pricing, even on legacy websites.

Key Features and Capabilities

• Universal Product Discovery: Search by keyword across Amazon, Walmart, Target, Etsy, and Shopify stores simultaneously, receiving structured results with images, prices, specs, variants, ratings, and live stock status
• Programmatic Ordering: Place orders by sending a product URL, shipping address, and price cap—Zinc handles checkout and returns an order ID in seconds
• Flexible Account Options: Use Zinc's retailer accounts or bring your own logins for custom pricing and account preferences
• Normalized Tracking: Unified timeline consolidating retailer emails, carrier scans, and delivery photos across all carriers (UPS, FedEx, USPS, Amazon Logistics, DHL)
• Automated Returns Processing: Generate return labels and initiate returns programmatically without support tickets
• Real-Time Webhooks: Event notifications for order status changes, shipments, delivery updates, and refund settlements
• Test Sandbox: Full testing environment with rehearsal products for every failure mode (out-of-stock, price spikes, shipping issues) before going live
• Branded Tracking Pages: Send shipping updates under your own branding with hosted tracking pages
• TypeScript and Python SDKs: Type-safe SDKs generated from spec for catching errors at development time

Workflows and Integration

Orders are funded through a Zinc Wallet—a prefunded balance that covers item cost, tax, shipping, and a $1 per-order fee. The platform has processed 20M+ orders and shipped hundreds of millions of products, with infrastructure designed to handle container-ship-scale volumes. Rate limits are tunable based on volume, and batch order creation is supported for high-throughput scenarios. Tracking updates are automatically extracted and normalized, with webhooks firing as events occur rather than requiring polling.

What Differentiates It

Unlike catalog-based solutions that serve stale data, Zinc pulls live product information directly from retailers at query time. The platform's resilience is battle-tested against retailer redesigns, checkout rewrites, and delivery exceptions. AI agents can mint their own test API keys without creating an account, and orders placed on Zinc's accounts ship within the US, Germany, and Italy. The changelog shows weekly updates with new retailers, endpoints, and infrastructure improvements.