Optimizing Performance with Request Chaining

If you send multiple consecutive API requests, consider using request chaining to improve performance. Request chaining allows you to combine multiple requests into a single API call. Since all requests stay within Cash App’s infrastructure, it significantly reduces roundtrip latency.

In internal test, chaining 3 requests—create brand, create merchant, and create customer —reduced latency by 50–70%. Actual performance gains may vary, depending on your infrastructure and the number of requests chained.

Example usage:

Create Brand > Create Merchant > Create Customer Request
Upsert Brand > Upsert Merchant > Create Payment
Retrieve Fee Plan > Upsert Merchant
Create API Key > Update Webhook Endpoint

For example code snippets and implementation details, see the request chaining API page.

Request chaining errors

What happens if there’s an error making a request?

It depends on where the error occurred, for example:

If the error happened at the requested endpoint, such as while creating a brand, then request chaining will stop executing subsequent requests. It will return the error in the list of responses and all subsequent requests will be marked as not started.
If the error happened in the request chaining logic, such as accessing a previous response’s value, then it will return a validation error with a status code 400.