# Channels

> A Channel is a sales or distribution surface that products are published to.

A **Channel** is a sales or distribution surface you publish products to - your online store, a marketplace like Amazon, a retail point of sale, or a wholesale catalog. Assigning a [Product](/api/product-management/products/) to a channel makes it available there, and the channel is one of the dimensions used to **resolve prices**: pass `resolveContext[channel]` on a read to get the price a buyer would see on that channel.

Each channel has a translatable `name` and a `status`, so you can stage a channel as `draft` before opening it.

## The Channel object

## Common workflows

- **Open a new sales surface.** Create a `draft` channel, assign products to it, and flip it to `active` with [`PATCH`](/api/product-management/channels/update/) when it goes live.
- **Resolve channel-specific prices.** Pass `resolveContext[channel]` (with `resolveContext[country]` and `resolveContext[at]`) when reading [Variants](/api/product-management/variants/) so each variant's `resolvedPrice` reflects what a buyer on that channel would pay.
- **Curate per-channel assortments.** Manage which products appear on a channel through its `products` list.

## Conventions

### Authentication and headers

All requests require an OAuth 2.0 bearer token and the organization scope header:

```
Authorization: Bearer <token>
X-Flowkiwi-Organization-Id: <organization-id>
```

For the translatable `name`, set the active locale (and optionally a fallback):

```
X-Flowkiwi-Locale: fr-FR
X-Flowkiwi-Locale-Fallback: en-US
```

### Partial updates

`PATCH` uses [JSON Merge Patch](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7396) with `Content-Type: application/merge-patch+json`.