# What is Relay?

Relay is a new product offering from Violet that allows our users to leverage our unified API for use cases outside of Checkout.

Relay enables you to access a real-time data across any integrated E-commerce platform — Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Square, etc. — through a single API and unified model. Violet does the hard work of integrating to each of these platforms and unifying the data so that you can focus on building the experiences you need.

Using Relay, a channel can directly access Product, Order and Collection data as well as subscribe to any updates related to this Product and Order data using webhooks. We also power bi-directional capabilities, so that you can perform your business operations, such as identifying fraudulent orders or performing pricing analysis, and then write data back to your merchants through the same API.

{% hint style="info" %}
Relay is a different product offering to Checkout. If you're familiar with our Checkout offering, you may already have a Violet application. You will need to contact us on <support@violet.io> to get your app Relay-enabled.
{% endhint %}

{% hint style="info" %}
When using Relay you are responsible for working within the bounds of the rate limits imposed by the external commerce platforms. When rate limits are exceeded some requests will begin to fail. You can view more information on Rate Limits [here](/concepts/rate-limits.md)
{% endhint %}


---

# Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation

If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question.

Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter:

```
GET https://docs.violet.io/relay/relay.md?ask=<question>
```

The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language.
The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation.

Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.