SellTrove's social sellers primarily use mobile devices. The API design decisions that serve them are different from those that serve desktop web clients.
Pagination with cursor-based pagination instead of offset pagination: offset pagination breaks when new records are inserted between page requests. Cursor pagination is stable under concurrent writes.
Response compression: Brotli for HTTPS endpoints. A 40% reduction in payload size is a meaningful improvement on mobile data.
Partial responses: the mobile client does not need all 47 fields on a product response. Design your API to support field selection (?fields=id,title,price) and return only what the client needs.
Offline capability: define which operations are safe to queue locally and sync on reconnection. Payment confirmation is not one of them. Browse history is.
— Dick Bassey | DevDick | 2025