Graceful degradation when marketplace APIs are “in the mood” again

At SellerHub, we ran into the classic 2025 e-commerce pain point: marketplace APIs, especially WB API, respond today and then start playing by their own rules an hour later. To keep the seller dashboard from turning into a pumpkin, we implemented graceful degradation.

What’s under the hood: — exponential backoff for retries, so we don’t keep hammering an unstable API; — a last-state cache, so we can still show data even if the platform goes down temporarily; — adapter versioning, because API changes “without warning” are already the norm; — monitoring for broken integrations, so we catch failures before the inevitable “but everything looks empty on our side” message.

The result: if one platform goes down, the seller still sees the dashboard instead of an error screen. In short, instead of “everything is lost” — controlled degradation. In a world where integrations are sometimes more fragile than prod on a Friday evening, this is a real must-have.