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Rate Limiting

The Trade Me API only allows clients to make a limited number of calls in a given hour. We start counting with the first call and count against the hour the call was made in. E.g. a request made at 13:20 will count against the 13:00:000-13:59:999 period. If the number of calls made within the hour exceeds our limit the API will begin to reject the calls. A subsequent call made at 14:00 will reset the counter to 1 and will be processed normally.

Rate limiting applies to all API methods, except Catalogue methods. If you are developing a website, you can take advantage of CORS to ensure that the rate limit is per user and not shared for all your users.

Authenticated API calls are limited to 1,000 calls an hour, charged per consumer application per user. In other words, every user of your application can make up to 1,000 requests per hour (assuming each user logs in under a separate Trade Me user account). As of March 2013 we now require that production applications be manually reviewed by Trade Me staff.

Your application will receive HTTP 429 response codes from our API if call rate limits are exceeded. We may restrict or alter API call rate limits at our discretion at any time.