API-access Amazon

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Current situation

I do online marketing for merchants: My customers are merchants, and I help them in various ways to increase their revenue over the Internet. One of my specialities is helping them to sell in bulk on Amazon (on basically all Amazon sites, including .com, .de, .co.uk, .es, etc.). E.g.: When a merchant or manufacturer has 10,000 different products that they want to sell on Amazon. Usual activites:

  • I receive product information in Excel-, XML- or other format. Somehow, this data is never complete nor accurate. I import this in a datawarehouse (dwh) that I developed in MySQL over the last couple of years
  • From the dwh, a product export file is generated. This is uploaded to Amazon, to make these products available for sale
  • Again from the dwh, an advertisment campaign is generated, which is uploaded as well
  • Monthly, I manually download advertisement reports
  • In the future, I would like to process these advertisements reports automatically, to optimize campaigns.

Environment

  • I work solely on Linux. Both servers and werkstation
  • The dwh is developed in MySQL, with SQL-scripts as stored procedures and as stand-alone scripts
  • In cases where SQL is too limited, I use PHP, Python or Bash.

Problems

Current practices (uploading product upload files and campaign files; downloading campaign report files) have some limitations:

  • On Amazon.it, the format for uploading campaign files, has recently changed from plain csv files to Excel files with multiple tabs. To incorporate this in the dwh, would require quite some rewriting. Wouldn't API-access be easier?
  • Campaign report files need to be downloaded manually, and only reports over the last two months are available for download. I easily forget this, plus it takes about 45 minutes each time (for one customer)
  • The maximum file size for campaign files is rather limited. At least once, I had to truncate a file to seven pieces, and uploading took hours, as I couldn't just upload them all at once
  • Optimalisation is quite difficult when interacting happens through huge files. Example: Ideally, product prices should frequently be updated, depending on market conditions. That's currently not possible
  • I would like to experience interacting with Amazon through APIs, as a goal on itself.

Solution

Interact with Amazon through API-access for the stuff mentioned above. For sellers on Amazon, there seem to be at least two separate APIs:

See also

Sources

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