A product can be on sale in one shade and gone in another
Ulta Beauty API returns live Ulta Beauty data as clean JSON for ulta beauty The primary endpoint, search, returns product results including product id, sku id, name, brand and image.
3 active endpoints. Every call is 2 credits.
- POST/ulta/v1/search
- POST/ulta/v1/price
- POST/ulta/v1/product_detail
What Ulta Beauty endpoints does ReefAPI ship?
3 live read endpoints. Read-only data API: no writes, no account actions, no dashboard access on the target site.
Ulta Beauty API
3 of 3 endpoints, ready to run
Browse a category for Ulta's own total and full paging, or give a keyword and let Ulta's type-ahead pick the category — either way rows carry the product id and sku, brand, image, list and sale price, rating, review count, shade count and Ulta's badges.
{ "ok": true, "meta": { "api": "ulta", "endpoint": "search", "mode": "live", "latency_ms": 1849.9, "record_count": 20, "cache_hit": false, "completeness_pct": 100 }, "data": { "products": [ { "product_id": "pimprod2057355", "sku_id": "2651970", "url": "https://www.ulta.com/p/double-wear-stay-in-place-longwear-matte-foundation-pimprod2057355?sku=2651970", "name": "Double Wear Stay-in-Place Longwear Matte Foundation", "brand": "Estée Lauder", "image": "https://media.ultainc.com/i/ulta/2651970", "image_alt": null, "list_price": 52, "list_price_max": 52, "sale_price": null, "sale_price_max": null, "price": 52, "currency": "USD", "on_sale": false, "discount_amount": null, "rating": 4.3, "review_count": 9998, "variant_label": "57 colors", "badge": null, "badge_tags": [], "promo_text": "Free Gift with purchase", "additional_offers_text": "+1 offers", "sponsored": false, "limited_stock": false }, { "product_id": "pimprod2051406", "sku_id": "2635749", "url": "https://www.ulta.com/p/studio-fix-powder-plus-foundation-pimprod2051406?sku=2635749", "name": "Studio Fix Powder Plus Foundation", "brand": "MAC", "image": "https://media.ultainc.com/i/ulta/2635749", "image_alt": null, "list_price": 39, "list_price_max": 39, "sale_price": null, "sale_price_max": null, "price": 39, "currency": "USD", "on_sale": false, "discount_amount": null, "rating": 3.8, "review_count": 3472, "variant_label": "70 colors", "badge": null, "badge_tags": [], "promo_text": "Free Gift with purchase", "additional_offers_text": null, "sponsored": false, "limited_stock": false }, { "product_id": "xlsImpprod5770257", "sku_id": "2264064", "url": "https://www.ulta.com/p/cc-cream-with-spf-50-xlsImpprod5770257?sku=2264064", "name": "CC+ Cream with SPF 50+", "brand": "IT Cosmetics", "image": "https://media.ultainc.com/i/ulta/2264064", "image_alt": null, "list_price": 39, "list_price_max": 39, "sale_price": null, "sale_price_max": null, "price": 39, "currency": "USD", "on_sale": false, "discount_amount": null, "rating": 4.3, "review_count": 22016, "variant_label": "30 colors", "badge": null, "badge_tags": [], "promo_text": null, "additional_offers_text": null, "sponsored": false, "limited_stock": false } ], "category": { "path": "/shop/makeup/face/foundation", "url": "https://www.ulta.com/shop/makeup/face/foundation", "title": "Foundation", "result_count": 237, "page": 1, "page_size": 64 }, "suggestions": null, "facets": { "sort": [ { "value": "best_sellers", "label": "Best Sellers" }, { "value": "price_asc", "label": "Price (low to high)" }, { "value": "price_desc", "label": "Price (high to low)" } ], "filters": [ { "group_id": "FORM", "title": "Form", "select": "MULTI", "param": "form", "values": [ { "value": "liquid", "label": "Liquid", "count": 135, "disabled": false }, { "value": "balm", "label": "Balm", "count": 3, "disabled": false }, { "value": "cream", "label": "Cream", "count": 22, "disabled": false } ] }, { "group_id": "FINISH", "title": "Finish", "select": "MULTI", "param": "finish", "values": [ { "value": "matte", "label": "Matte", "count": 87, "disabled": false }, { "value": "natural", "label": "Natural", "count": 100, "disabled": false }, { "value": "radiant", "label": "Radiant", "count": 55, "disabled": false } ] }, { "group_id": "COVERAGE", "title": "Coverage", "select": "MULTI", "param": "coverage", "values": [ { "value": "buildable", "label": "Buildable", "count": 102, "disabled": false }, { "value": "full", "label": "Full", "count": 84, "disabled": false }, { "value": "light", "label": "Light", "count": 48, "disabled": false } ] } ] } } }
How the Ulta Beauty API works
Ulta Beauty is a normal ReefAPI surface — the same four rules that hold for every other engine on the key.
No OAuth app, no request signing, no per-site account. One key covers all 184 engines.
Every route is a POST with a JSON body. Parameters are validated against the published schema before anything is charged.
Credits, not seats. Failed and blocked calls are never charged, and cache hits cost nothing.
One envelope everywhere. meta carries latency_ms, record_count and the endpoint that answered.
Keeping a beauty catalogue current without re-reading it
Shades price and sell out independently, so the thing that changes overnight is a variant, not a product.
{"category": "/shop/makeup/face/foundation", "max_results": "20"}Browsing by category gives Ulta's own result count and its facet vocabulary with counts, so paging is exact and filter values are never a guess.
{"product_id": "pimprod2057355", "sku_id": "2651970"}Then refresh the shades you sell, one small call each, instead of pulling a product document that carries every sibling shade you do not.
A catalogue you can keep fresh at variant level, with full product calls reserved for the rows that actually changed.
curl -X POST https://api.reefapi.com/ulta/v1/search \
-H "x-api-key: $REEF_KEY" \
-H "content-type: application/json" \
-d '{"category":"/shop/makeup/face/foundation","max_results":20}'{
"ok": true,
"data": { … },
"meta": {
"api": "ulta",
"endpoint": "search",
"mode": "live",
"latency_ms": …,
"record_count": …
},
"error": null
}Ulta product id prefixes, sku ids, and which key opens which door
Ulta keys a product one way and a shade another, and integrations break by assuming the product id is numeric. It is not: it always carries a letter prefix, and which prefix depends on how the item entered Ulta's catalogue. The sku is the numeric one. Measured on 2026-08-27 against the Foundation and Mascara categories and Estee Lauder Double Wear.
| Identifier | Format | Measured |
|---|---|---|
| product_id | a letter prefix followed by digits | pimprod2057355; across 20 Foundation rows, 16 were pimprod, 3 xlsImpprod and 1 VP. All are accepted verbatim |
| sku_id | 7 digits, one per shade or size | 2651970 - the variant key, and the only numeric id here |
| variants[].sku_id | the shade set | Double Wear returned 57 shades as a contiguous run, 2651970 through 2652026 |
| image URL | keyed by sku, not by product | media.ulta.com/i/ulta/<sku>; <sku>_sw is the color swatch and <sku>_sm the texture shot |
| category | the path out of a ulta.com/shop/ URL | /shop/makeup/face/foundation, with category.result_count 229 |
| meta.search_mode | which route answered | "category" when you browse one; "keyword_to_category" for a keyword - 'mascara' resolved to /shop/makeup/eyes/mascara with 391 results |
| review_count vs reviews.total_available | how many reviews you can actually pull | 9,991 on the record but total_available 550, because 9,441 of them are syndicated from the brand |
| reviews.rating_histogram | keys "1" through "5", summing to the rating count | 798 + 216 + 561 + 2115 + 6301 = 9,991 |
The slug in an Ulta product URL is decorative. /p/anything-pimprod2057355 resolves the same product, and the ?sku= suffix only decides which shade is treated as selected.
What a shade costs, and whose reviews those are
Measured on a category browse, a keyword search, a product opened at both pricing settings, a single shade re-checked and a category that does not exist.
Ulta's product page publishes a price for one shade. Rather than copying it across the rest, the response prices the ones it actually measured, marks each variant with whether its price was measured, samples a few more to check whether the shades price alike, and reports exactly what it did. A foundation with dozens of shades therefore returns a handful of measured prices by default, not dozens of guesses.
Turning that setting up on the same foundation took an upstream call for each shade and several times as long — and every shade came back at the same price. That is the trade being made explicit: the default is cheap and honest, the exhaustive setting is available, and the response tells you how many calls it spent either way.
One foundation's rating was built from close to ten thousand reviews, of which only a few hundred were written on Ulta — the rest are syndicated from elsewhere. The response separates the native count from the syndicated one. If you are treating a rating as a signal about this retailer's shoppers, that distinction is the whole ballgame, and almost nobody publishes it.
A product can be on sale and buyable in one shade while another is sold out, so there is no single product-level answer. The price action refuses a product id on its own rather than returning something that is right about the product and wrong about your variant.
A category gives Ulta's own total, full paging and the facet vocabulary with counts. A keyword goes through Ulta's own type-ahead, which decides which category answers it — useful, but the result set is Ulta's interpretation of your word. A path that does not exist comes back with an explanation and a pointer to Ulta's own published list rather than an empty page.
What people build with Ulta Beauty
The jobs this data is most often used for.
endpoints
credits per call
Pricing and assortment teams use Ulta Beauty to find products on ulta.com (US).
Brand-protection teams use Ulta Beauty to get re-check ONE variant's price and stock, cheaply.
Retail analysts use Ulta Beauty to get one Ulta Beauty product in full, by Ulta's product id or by its ulta.com URL.
What Ulta Beauty data costs
The cheapest call here is 2 credits, so $15/mo (Pro) buys 5,000 of them — $1.50 per 1,000 credits. Credits roll over and never expire, and failed or blocked calls are not charged.
Full pricing →- 1,000 free credits on signup, no card
- One key, all 184 APIs, one credit pool
- Failed and blocked calls are never charged
- Credits roll over and never expire
Call it in two lines
Sign up, get 1,000 credits and one key that works on every engine. Then this is the whole protocol.
curl -X POST https://api.reefapi.com/ulta/v1/search \
-H "x-api-key: $REEF_KEY" \
-H "content-type: application/json" \
-d '{"category":"/shop/makeup/face/foundation","max_results":20}'import requests
r = requests.post(
"https://api.reefapi.com/ulta/v1/search",
headers={"x-api-key": REEF_KEY},
json={
"category": "/shop/makeup/face/foundation",
"max_results": 20
},
)
print(r.json()["data"])Have a question? We got answers.
The questions people actually ask before wiring up Ulta Beauty.
Get a free key →What do the ulta product id prefixes mean, and are they interchangeable?▾
They record how the item entered Ulta's catalogue, and you never construct them, you read them off search. A single browse of the Foundation category returned 16 ids prefixed pimprod, 3 prefixed xlsImpprod and 1 prefixed VP. All prefixes are passed through verbatim and all resolve on product_detail, so the practical rule is to treat product_id as an opaque string and never as a number.
Why do most Ulta variants come back with a null price?▾
Because an ulta.com product page prices only the shade it has selected; the other swatches genuinely carry no price, so each additional variant price is a separate small request. With variant_prices set to none, a measured 57-shade foundation returned exactly one priced variant and 56 nulls, and price_note in the response said so. Every variant carries price_measured so you can tell a real null from an unfetched one, and no price is ever copied down from the product.
Why can I only retrieve 550 reviews out of 9,991?▾
Because 9,441 of them are syndicated - written on the brand's own site and shown on Ulta under license - and only the 550 native ones can be paged. The response splits this out as native_review_count and syndicated_review_count, with total_available set to the number you can actually reach. The star average and the full 1-to-5 histogram still cover all 9,991.
What happens if I ask for a sku that does not exist on the product?▾
NOT_FOUND, with a message explaining what happened. A measured call for sku 9999999 on pimprod2057355 was refused because Ulta answered about sku 2651970, the product's default variant, instead of admitting the sku was unknown. That substitution is detected and rejected rather than passed on, which would otherwise hand you a plausible price for the wrong shade.
How does an Ulta keyword search turn into a category?▾
The keyword goes through Ulta's own type-ahead and whichever category Ulta suggests is then browsed, which is exactly what a shopper gets from the search box. meta.search_mode reports keyword_to_category when that happened, and data.category names the path it landed on. Searching 'mascara' resolved to /shop/makeup/eyes/mascara with 391 results, and suggestions[] returned Ulta's own matches, mixing type "category" rows with type "product" rows that already carry a product_id and sku_id.
When should I use the price action instead of product_detail?▾
When you already hold the product_id and sku_id and only want to know what that one variant costs today. It returns product_id, sku_id, variant_label, current_price, regular_price, on_sale and in_stock and nothing else - a measured call on sku 2651975 came back 52.0 and 52.0 with the label "1N2 Ecru (light with neutral rosy undertones)". product_detail on the same product moves over a megabyte.
Are Ulta's category filters real, and where do I get the valid values?▾
They come back as live data in facets.filters, per category, with a product count on every value. The Foundation category published 11 facet groups including Form with 8 values, Finish with 3, Coverage with 4, Skin Type with 5, SPF with 6, Preferences with 26 and Brand with 78. Take the value verbatim from there rather than guessing, because the vocabulary differs by category - Shampoo has no Coverage group at all.
What is the Ulta Beauty API?▾
Ulta Beauty API is a ReefAPI endpoint group for ulta beauty It returns live JSON through POST requests under /ulta/v1.
Is the Ulta Beauty API free to try?▾
Yes. ReefAPI starts with 1,000 free credits, no card required. Ulta Beauty calls use the same shared credit balance as every other ReefAPI engine.
Do I need an Ulta Beauty login or account?▾
No login to Ulta Beauty is needed for the API response. You call ReefAPI with your x-api-key header, and the playground can run live examples before you create a production key.
How fresh is the Ulta Beauty data?▾
The page example is captured from a live search call, and production requests fetch live data through ReefAPI rather than a static sample.
How many credits does the Ulta Beauty API use?▾
Ulta Beauty actions currently cost 2 credits per successful call. Failed or blocked calls are free, and all APIs draw from one credit pool.
Can I call Ulta Beauty from an AI assistant or MCP client?▾
Yes. Connect ReefAPI once through MCP and your assistant can call ulta actions with the same key, credit pool and JSON envelope used by normal REST requests.
Is the Ulta Beauty API an Ulta Beauty scraper?▾
It is the managed alternative to a DIY Ulta Beauty scraper. Instead of building and maintaining your own scraper — proxies, headless browsers, captcha and constant breakage — you call one ReefAPI endpoint and get the same ulta beauty back as clean JSON.
16 More APIs APIs on the same key
One key, one credit pool, one response envelope. If you are pulling Ulta Beauty, you are one call away from the rest of the category — no second contract, no second integration.
Need something this API does not do?
Name the endpoint, the field, or a source we do not carry yet. We ship new APIs every week and you would be first to get the key. Real people read every message and reply the same day.
Try it on your own data before you pay anything
The call above is the real endpoint, not a recording. A free key gives you 1,000 credits, the other 183 APIs, and the same envelope everywhere.
Endpoints, parameters and credit costs on this page are read from the live catalog and cannot drift from what the API accepts. Field notes were captured on 2026-08-30.