API Limitations

Last modified: 20. September 2022

Request Limits

If the HTTP requests from an IP address exceed the value of 200 connections within 30 seconds, each additional connection of the participant will, for the next 30 minutes, result in blocking and the following error message:

HTTP 503 Rate Limit Exceeded. You’re now blocked for 30 minutes. ITscope Web Service and ITscope API is limited to 200 requests per 30 seconds.

After 30 minutes, successful connections to the API can be established once again.

This limitation is to be used as a guideline, operating very close to this limit will also potentially result in a high risk of being blocked.


In order to prevent any connection restrictions, there are several ways to communicate with the web services.

  • Retrieve more records at the same time: a maximum of 50 products can be queried in a request (using comma-separated values, e.g. search/id=123000,346001,943875000 etc.). The maximum size of a request header is 16 kb for our web service.
  • Send the requests with a delay, e.g. with a pause of a few seconds after each request.
  • A HTTP user agent header should always be set, since otherwise stricter blocking rules can take effect. Advice for setting the user agent.
  • Use the ITscope data export in order to obtain larger amounts of data.

Real-time query limits

More details can be found in the real-time query parameters description. 

Data export limits

  • ITscope Integration: up to 200,000 products per export.
  • ITscope Enterprise: up to 800,000 products per export.
  • Fair Use Policy: regularly retrieve full formats (standard and developer) once a day, retrieve update formats (standardUpdate and developerUpdate) several times an hour.
  • More details can be found in the data formats and output formats support article.

Attributes and Attribute clusters

The attributes and attribute clusters are only visible in the data formats and output formats if the appropriate contract is available.

See https://www.itscope.com/en/pricing/for-resellers/ for more information on ITscope contracts.

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