Understanding Amazon API For Advertisers and Sellers 

The Amazon Product Advertising API is an exclusive tool, only available to members of the Amazon Associates program, enabling affiliates to channel appropriate traffic to their Amazon listings. Amazon’s Product Advertising API has also been expanded to function both on and off Amazon’s website.

The Amazon Product Advertising API provides a channel to scale, optimize, and automate advertising. Performance and Campaign data for Sponsored Brands, Products, and displays are available through the API, enabling automatic access for campaign management and reporting.

Amazon Attribution (beta) viewpoints can be seen through the Amazon Advertising API. Amazon Attribution helps measure the impact made by non-Amazon Advertising media such as Amazon PPC ads, video ads, email marketing, social ads, and display ads on the marketing campaign. It offers a great view of a customer’s shopping journey, including detailed page views, purchases, and clicks, showing how the data can be utilized to optimize campaign ROI.

The Amazon Product Advertising API is open-ended, allowing users to develop flexible solutions to suit their aims and needs and allow for deeper integration with Amazon Advertising. The API displays most of the advertising console functionality while enabling developer’s management, allowing advertisers to manage marketing campaigns or several campaigns based on set conditions.

The Advertising API tool is robust for users to develop, manage and implement versioning and updates. This article desires to help you understand how to leverage it to meet your needs.

API users include but are not restricted to:

• Advertisers in charge of their ad spend, have internal programming and development resources, and directly manage many marketing campaigns for brands and products.
• Advertising consultants and solution providers who incorporate with the API and offer paid Amazon ad reporting and management tools to agencies and advertisers who lack the means and connectivity to integrate with the API directly
• Agencies that have internal programming and development resources and manage a high volume of Amazon PPC marketing campaigns for brands and products.

The first form, known as Product Advertising (PA API), is used to get programmatic access to retrieve Amazon product information on your website. Like link building using their SiteStripe feature, this API allows you to monetize your website with programmable ad types.

To use PA API, you are required to have programming skills. We will get into those programming skills in the next section. First, let’s talk about how Amazon works with this system for selling partners.

The second form of API is the Selling Partner form (SP API). Like the PA API, the SP form is better for sellers who need programmatic access between features on their Amazon seller page.

This system allows developers to build applications for their seller pages, other pages, or public use on the Amazon Marketplace Appstore.

Amazon offers the majority of this report information through their Marketplace Web Service (MWS). The MWS Page provides reports on a variety of API sections.

When gathering information, Amazon allows you to develop applications that are responsive to data from these sections. For example, these seller features may track inventory information. But if the inventory isn’t there, the prospective customer will not see this when looking at a page that contains an Amazon ad.

Product Advertising API operations allow for access to Amazon’s databases allowing for the advantageous use of Amazon’s sophisticated e-commerce data and Amazon PPC functionality. It also allows you to create your online store to sell both Amazon items or your items.

The Amazon Product Advertising API is free, but users must first sign up for the Amazon Associates program. By being a Product Advertising API developer, you join the elite group of thousands of developers who realize massive financial gains by creating Product Advertising API-run web stores and apps while utilizing Amazon PPC functionality. Below are the features of product advertising API;

• Easy integration: Out of the box, the SDKs are available in prevalent languages for easy connectivity and adoption. The SDKs removes the heavy lifting of signing the request, response de-serialization, and request serialization.
• Lighter, Slimmer, and Faster: the new update PA-API 5.0 is built from scratch to offer faster responses and uses resources over response groups used in earlier designs. The new PA-API 5.0 supports the lighter and slimmer JSON format over XML supported in earlier builds.
• Search Index: The search index feature specifies the category that a product a user will search for belongs. Search Index helps to narrow down search results and filter out unrelated products.
• Operation: this shows the functions the API tool can perform. The search functions include SimilarityLookup, ItemSearch, and ItemLookup. The tool also consists of the shopping cart options, such as CartAdd and CartCreate.
• Browse Nodes: this feature categorizes products to show product relationships (i.e., a root browse node is jeans, and parent browse nodes are women’s, children’s, and men’s).
• Better Customer Experience: PA-API 5.0 presents features consistent with Amazon retail-like PrimeExclusive eligibility, LanguageOfPreference compatibility, Multiple and intuitive Amazon seller rank information in the context of a particular BrowseNode.
• Associate Tag: Each Amazon affiliate has a distinct tag created for them. This tag then follows consumers who access Amazon from an affiliate’s app, blog, or website, allowing Amazon to utilize and recognize the traffic generated from an affiliate’s platform and pays a requisite commission.
• Keywords: This includes Keywords used to search for products and brands available on Amazon.
• Response Group: Ability to search for details related to specific products or brands. It has a default option that includes complete information on a product and can be adjusted to narrow down search results.
• AWS Access Key Id: This is an access key generated to call the API and sign the API request.
• Signature: the signature is used for verification purposes. It is a hash key created when a user signs a request for the API.
• Timestamp: This function indicates when a user initiates the API tool.

The primary focus of the application programming interface is to program applications. When considering their gateway, these applications come in one of two forms:

• RESTful applications expose HTTP endpoints, Lambda functions, or other services on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
• These also include active WebSocket APIs for AWS services, Lambda functions, and other AWS services.

For developers and sellers, these can be handy tools that can gather data from the above sources. You might expect that there is a lot of jargon from this very technical section. Below, we are going to define a few critical areas you need to know.

Lambda is a service of AWS that allows you to run code without managing servers. Through AWS, Lambda only charges when you make use of the code. For example, an inventory reduction may cause an event to occur, reducing the amount of advertising for said item.

This change is essential when determining the usefulness and effectiveness of advertising campaigns. If you have sponsored products or sponsored brands, control over how they appear through an automated code can mean the difference between happy and unhappy customers.

It would be best if you also understood the difference between REST and WebSocket.

What is REST?

Representational state transfer, otherwise known as REST, is a standard for web applications that use multiple web services. Programmers enjoy RESTful systems because of their quick performance and reliability.

The bulk of this speed comes from the transfer system’s ability to reuse components. The system is also known to be responsive to communications but does not provide a continuously active connection. So if you, as a seller, are paying per data transfer, RESTful applications are known to save a lot of bandwidth and money.

What is WebSocket?

WebSocket API provides a continuous two-way connection between the browser of the shopper and the server. The browser-side makes a request out to the server, allowing that server to respond accordingly.

As you may expect, WebSocket is a lot more expensive to maintain because of the continuous connection. As a continuously active system, Amazon needs this to be as effective and responsive as it can be.

A great example of this is if someone used the Amazon API to create a chat system. The continuous connection sends signals to keep the connections between these two people alive. This system can be convenient when creating a customer relationship management system.

This system doesn’t wait for a signal like RESTful APIs. Instead, WebSocket selects a route and travels down it. The route is sent between backend services and clients, allowing for efficient retrieval of data. One side can still close the connection, so it is only active as long as it is needed.

This data can be crucial in furthering your goals as a business. This data can be imperative to advertisers who will adjust their strategies depending upon what changes. Regardless of having an internal source of information or hiring an external marketing agency, this can be handy.

So what does Amazon’s API service do differently from these reports?

The Amazon Advertising API and the manual downloads are both populated from the same data source. The data found in the manual downloads can also be found through the Amazon Advertising API. However, trying to find comparable manual report data in the Amazon Advertising API data is not straightforward, and you’ll need to know where and how to track it down. It’s best to start with a review of the reports currently available through the Seller Central and Vendor Central Advertising platforms to understand what you should be able to locate in the Amazon Advertising API data.

For Amazon Ads reporting, the benefits derived from using Amazon Advertising API data include:

• Ongoing data updates ensure that your reporting accurately reflects results as Amazon always restates its data set. If you’re using a data set downloaded manually, Amazon has likely repeated the numbers since your last pull, and your reporting numbers are misstated.
• Your data is directly connected to your Amazon Ads reporting solution. This implies that your Amazon Ads reporting solution is automatically updated to reflect current results; simply refreshing the data connection page is all you require. Making use of the Amazon Advertising API data warehousing solution, instead of uploading the data, each visual points directly to the correct data for each client and ensures that your data displays correctly and accurately.
• You don’t have to fret about pulling data for specific periods. The Amazon Advertising API provides data daily, ensuring that you can view the data in any time frame you want (i.e., daily, weekly, monthly, etc.). When using manual report download, you pull a new data set to obtain the previous day’s data. This would need to be done daily to get the correct numbers for budgeting and reporting purposes.
• Continuous data access does not need a team member to spend time pulling, formatting, preparing, and storing data.
• It makes the care of multiple brands scalable and manageable. It is noteworthy that manually downloaded reports require preparation and manipulation, and for those managing multiple brands, you’ll need to add a client identification field to each data set. But with the API ads reporting mechanism, all you need do is implement a filter in your reporting solution to run through all your managed accounts with ready data available at your fingertips.
• Through the right development, a program that a developer creates can respond to this data. That response can be anything from taking down products from advertising to sending an automated response to your email. This automated response can be on anything, but it may come from an ad campaign’s lack of functionality. This “ping” from the system may raise a discussion on what needs to be changed to make this useful.

• In order to see the broad spectrum of Amazon Advertising API Data, you should complement it with Operations data.
• Be hands-on in reporting. Know that recurring maintenance and support will be required for reporting, which should be pivotal when choosing a reporting tool.
• Do your research and understand the limitations of any potential reporting solutions before making a choice. Ensure that you can have access to the data you intend to report on.
• Amazon Product Advertising API helps get the best of your Amazon PPC set-up.
• For brands seeking reliable tools to enable success on Amazon, DataHawk provides Robust Analytics and Amazon Selling Tools for SEO, Product Intelligence, and Advertising.