I am working with a client who sells products from a few different vendors. They want a separate page for each vendor and want a list view and detail view of each product. Most of their clients send them a list of products and they will have to manually input the products into their system. Easy.

Now one of their clients is a much larger supplier and has an API where you can pull back all the product info through unique IDs. Technically my client could also just find these and load them manually but they have asked if it would be possible to load those automagically. Initially I thought I could just write some PHP or JS, connect to the API, loop through each unique ID, return the values, and then send them into my pages. However, is there a better/cleaner way? Maybe create a custom plugin that connects to the API and sends all the data into a CPT that way they are editable.

Has anyone ever done something like this that can shed any light on a good way to go about it?