Lexer’s APIs overview

Lexer offers a suite of APIs that allow your developers to push and pull your data from the Lexer CDXP, and supporting products and features. These APIs allow you to read and write profiles, transactions, and customer-event data. This information can then interoperate with other systems and platforms, and add new functionality to Lexer products.

Things you need to know before getting started

• All APIs are subject to Lexer’s License and Terms of Use.
• All APIs are subject to Rate Limits.
• All APIs require developers to Authenticate.
• Some APIs are versioned.

Scopes and permissions

As a requirement, you will need access to the Lexer Hub if you would like to create and administer access to our APIs. If you have multiple Hubs, you will need to ensure you set each one up with an API, as configuration can vary for each CDXP. 

Please note:

• Some APIs, like Profile Read API, require additional security configurations such as IP Whitelisting.
• Some APIs may incur additional costs, or require Lexer to configure.
• Some APIs may require approval from Lexer.

Please contact Lexer Support if you would like our Solutions team to help explore your options.

Status

For information on API status and breaking changes, visit Lexer Status.

API Concepts

Your data is organized in a specific way to ensure your MarTech stack is able to consume the data correctly. Your data is organized into datasets which contain events, and entities. These are enriched within your Hub into attributes, and unified into profiles.

Profiles, events, and entities

Within the Lexer CDXP, events are the primary external data types that populate your profiles with their history of transactions, emails, returns, etc. 

Events represent a one-time event in a ledger format that when aggregated, shows the present standing of a profile. We have the following event types:

• Ecommerce purchase, and return.
• In-store purchase, and return.
• Email subscribe, send, open, click, and bounce.
• SMS subscribe, send, and click.

Entities are commonly referenced in events, usually capturing metadata to aid in the enrichment of your profiles. For example, a product usually contains metadata that, when purchased, can inform you about the product preferences of the profile making the purchase. 

A product could contain:

• Name
• Categories
• Images
• Variations

This metadata can then be used to enrich profiles in your Hub through attributes like Colors Purchased, or Product Categories Purchased, when a profile makes a purchase. 

Profiles represent your customers. They contain all the enriched events provided, and are unified on identifiers such as email addresses, cell phone numbers, and any internal identifiers you provide.

For more information read about Unification.

Datasets

Within the Lexer CDXP, data is stored in datasets. Each one has a specific type that defines the automatic unification and enrichment of the data into the 360º customer view managed by Lexer. These types are: customer, ecommerce, point-of-sale, email, and SMS.

It’s common to have a dozen or more datasets in the Lexer CDXP, we recommend you create one for each unique platform or source of data, it will make administration much easier.
For example, you might have a separate dataset for:

• Shopify
• Klaviyo
• Customer data stored in a data warehouse or ERP
• Customer data captured from a recent NPS survey
• Customer data purchased from a 3rd party list provider

Datasets are managed in the Dataset Manager within your Lexer hub. For more information, read about Dataset Management.

Attributes

Datasets, containing events and entities, are enriched within the lexer CDXP. The result for you is the attributes you see on your customer profiles. For example, we aggregate the lifetime spend of a profile, from all transactions across all commerce type datasets, and produce a Lifetime Value attribute.

Lexer has bottled best-in-class retail data science into the Lexer CDXP by producing over 300 290 highly-valuable, retail-focused attributes.

For more information, and a full list, read about Attributes on Learn. 

Custom attributes

You can go beyond our initial set of attributes by defining your own within the Lexer Hub. You’re able to do your own data science, or import new attributes from external systems not already provided by Lexer.

Custom attributes are defined on your datasets, and could be used to import:

• Questions asked in competitions, forms, and surveys from external systems.
• Outputs of your own data science work, such as churn or propensity scores.
• Flags or statuses from externally managed or bought lists.
• Specific customer details not captured in the existing customer dataset model.

For more information on how to add a custom attribute, read about Dataset Management.

Available APIs

Profile API

Allows the writing of your customer data into profiles within your Lexer CDXP. As well as providing profile linkage data for unification, capabilities include writing customer data like email addresses, phone numbers, names, birthdates, gender, etc. 

Commerce API

Provides write endpoints for purchases, returns, products, and other commerce-related data to your Lexer CDXP to enrich profiles' purchase history.

Marketing API

Contains write endpoints for email and SMS events on a profile including subscribes, sends, opens, clicks, and bounces. These are used to enrich profiles on your CDXP.

Compliance API

Provides the ability for you to enact customers' GDPR or CCPA rights to be forgotten. 

Export API

Provides endpoints to gather data out of your CDXP. Allows you to do basic filtering and reading of all of your data stored in the Lexer CDXP datasets.

Please see our articles on S3 and SFTP or for alternative export capabilities.

That’s a wrap

This overview has provided some details about how Lexer’s APIs work. If this seems like the right option for you, you are in the right place. Please continue to read through our API documentation using the above links, and reach out to your Success Manager if you have any questions.