SanMar Now Requires Your Own Credentials on PSRESTful

SanMar moved PSRESTful onto their Third-Party Services Provider agreement. The headline change for distributors: SanMar will no longer let us share pricing or inventory with any PSRESTful account that isn’t a SanMar customer in their own right.

That’s a SanMar policy decision, not ours, and we already complied. As of this week, every PSRESTful surface that touches SanMar PPC (Pricing & Configuration) or INV (Inventory) checks whether your account has its own SanMar credentials configured. If it doesn’t, those endpoints return 403 and the UI hides the data.

Product Data and Media Content are unaffected. You can still browse SanMar’s catalog, see images, sizes, colors, and full product attributes — that part is general-purpose information SanMar is happy for distributors to discover.

If you already have SanMar credentials, add them once on your PSRESTful supplier credentials page  and everything below goes back to working exactly as before. If you don’t, this post explains what every screen and endpoint will look like until you do.

API: 403 with a clear reason

The PromoStandards proxy endpoints for SanMar PPC and INV now respond with:

HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
Content-Type: application/json
 
{
  "detail": "SanMar requires your own credentials for the PPC service. Please add your SanMar credentials to your PSRESTful account."
}

The same 403 + same detail shape is returned by:

• Direct PPC proxy — GET /v1.0.0/suppliers/SanMar/pricing-and-configuration/{product_id}
• Direct Inventory proxy — both versions are gated: GET /v2.0.0/suppliers/SanMar/inventory/{product_id} and GET /v1.2.1/suppliers/SanMar/inventory/{product_id}
• Extra Product Detail v1 and v2 when you ask the response to expand pricing or inventory (?expand=pricing,inventory). The product/media payload still resolves; only the pricing/inventory branches are gated
• Extra Bulk Inventory — the convenience endpoint that fetches inventory for several product IDs in one round-trip is now gated for SanMar too

The wording in detail swaps PPC for INV on the inventory routes so a client error log makes it obvious which service was refused.

Caching note: errors cache for 2 hours

We extended response caching to cover error responses on the SanMar proxy routes — same 2-hour TTL as a successful response. There’s one explicit exception: invalid credentials (the case where you did configure a SanMar account on PSRESTful but the username or password is wrong) skip the cache. We don’t want a fixed-this-morning credential to be invisible until the cache expires.

The 403 “credentials not configured” response, on the other hand, is stable per account and worth caching — it shaves load off both PSRESTful and SanMar’s edge.

UI: every PSRESTful tool, one screen at a time

SanMar shows up in roughly every tool we’ve shipped, so the credential-gating change touches all of them. Here’s the per-tool breakdown.

Data Explorer

Data Explorer  still lists SanMar as a supplier, but the service tiles change behavior:

• Product Data and Media Content — fully clickable. You get the same explorer experience as before.
• Pricing & Configuration and Inventory — clickable, but the response panel renders the 403 message above instead of a service payload. We surface the detail text so you immediately know what to do.

We deliberately left the failing tiles in place rather than hiding them. Data Explorer is the tool engineers reach for to understand what the API is actually doing — quietly removing two services would be more confusing, not less.

Stock Check

Stock Check  is an inventory-only tool. With no usable inventory access for SanMar, the supplier is hidden from the dropdown entirely until your account is set up. No empty result panes, no half-results.

Product Search

Product Search  keeps SanMar visible because the catalog itself is still searchable — but the price and inventory cells go quiet.

In the search results, the List Price, List Decorated, Net Blank, and Net Decorated columns are replaced with a single Add credentials link per row. The product itself still renders — Extra ID, supplier, product ID, name, brand, image, on-demand and rush flags all come through Product Data and Media.

The product detail page makes the same trade-off, with a friendlier explanation:

You still get the brand, the swatches, the category, the gallery — everything that’s powered by Product Data and Media. Pricing and inventory are replaced with credential-prompt callouts that link directly to the SanMar setup form.

Pricing Calculator

The Pricing Calculator  is a developer aid for understanding how PromoStandards composes a final price (including decoration charges, location math, and partial decorations). It needs PPC data to be useful, so SanMar is removed from the supplier dropdown until your credentials are in place.

CSV Exporter

The CSV Exporter  generates feeds in several shapes for downstream systems. Almost every shape includes pricing or inventory columns, and a half-empty SanMar export tends to break the importer on the other end. SanMar is removed from the exporter’s supplier list — once credentials are configured, it shows up again with all output formats.

Data Validation Tool

The Data Validation tool  checks up to 100 products for distributor against PromoStandards best practices, including PPC and INV checks. Without credentialed access, those checks can’t run cleanly for SanMar, so the tool drops SanMar from its supplier picker rather than reporting misleading failures.

Broken Links

Same logic as the Validation tool for the Broken Links checker : many of the link checks resolve through PPC/INV media or pricing endpoints. SanMar is hidden from the supplier list until credentials are added.

Web Service Validator

Web Service Validator  was already credential-aware — it has always limited supplier choices to ones the account is authorized to call. Nothing changes in its UX; SanMar is simply not in the dropdown for accounts without SanMar credentials, the same way every other “your-credentials-only” supplier already worked.

What this means in practice

If you’re a SanMar distributor:

1. Open the Configure Credentials page in your PSRESTful dashboard .
2. Add your SanMar customer number, username, and password in the SanMar row.
3. The 403s vanish and every tool above goes back to full functionality.

If you aren’t a SanMar customer:

• You can still discover SanMar products, see images and attributes, and design catalog flows around them.
• Pricing, inventory, and the cross-supplier tools that depend on them won’t show SanMar data — and that’s the policy we have to honor.
• The cleanest path forward is to open a SanMar account; everything turns on as soon as the credentials land in PSRESTful.

Why we leaned into this rather than around it

We could have hidden SanMar everywhere. We chose the opposite: keep SanMar visible in tools where the catalog itself is still useful (Product Search, Data Explorer), and hide them only where the entire tool depends on PPC/INV (Stock Check, Pricing Calculator, CSV Exporter, Data Validation, Broken Links).

The reason is simple — distributors discover, design, and quote in different rooms. A buyer scoping a program can still find the right SanMar SKU from a photo or a search and bring the customer number to the table later. A developer wiring up an integration can still open Data Explorer and see the exact 403 they’ll see in production, with the exact remediation in detail. None of that requires bending SanMar’s policy.

If you want help connecting your SanMar customer account to PSRESTful, get in touch  and we’ll walk you through it.