E-Commerce on Amazon — Leveraging APIs to measure performance

“black Samsung Galaxy smartphone displaying Amazon logo” by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash

As part of an e-commerce initiative, we are running a stand-alone e-commerce web-shop coupled with a connector to different marketplaces. One of which is Amazon, where we are running both Amazon Fulfilled and Merchant fulfilled programs. We are also using their advertising platforms to advertise our products using the headline search and sponsored product features.

APIs and SDKs Overviews

Given that we are using python to perform data transformation, it made sense to look at what was available into existing SDK that could support our use case and on Python boto is the de-facto SDK to use to perform API calls towards Amazon, typically AWS.

• The first issue with using boto as an SDK for e-commerce purpose is that the marketplace web-service, which handles orders, order items and inventory is only available as an end point as of boto v2.49 and is not yet supported within the boto 3 release.
• The second issue comes from the advertising side, headline search and sponsored products now fall under a different API setup, the Amazon Advertising API which is not supported in any boto release. The Ads API has its own documentation and uses the login with amazon for authentication. This is in contrast with the setup with Amazon MWS which requires to register as a…