- You must know the exact nature of services offered by Amazon. Also know about the seller central api’s for add/edit/delete inventory on amazon as well as idea of which service to use for downward synchronization.
- You must have an idea of what does it mean by Amazon Fulfillment API,
Amazon Product Advertising API,
Amazon e-Commerce Services,
Amazon Associates Web Service
and never get confused with several services offered by amazon including its cloud computing and storage services. - My typical seller's listing solution was Found in Product Advertising API and started experimenting its BrowseNodes first which got successful and I got a number of nodes with default seller: Amazon.
- easiest way to find out sellerid is to access the path: http://www.amazon.com/seller/[YourShopName] as soon as you hit this, amazon will take you to a page with shop’s info: look for the url now. url will have a sellerid for sure provided by amazon in the url to access right shop.
- Be aware of locale: you must be very sure which international amazon website hold the products of your shop. If you are accessing amazon.com for your uk based shop, you are on way to endless fatigue.
- knowing the correct API procedure to call. Know what exactly you require and what are the meaning for several required & optional parameters of API Request calls. Start with only minimal required parameters and build correct signatures to be sent with the request.
- Must know the ResponseGroups and Search Indices. Correct RG will ease your life in getting exact data from amazon.
- Know the error messages returned by amazon and try solutions to them. Normally they can be logical and require a little attention towards right combination of request parameters. Again knowing the exact nature & combination of request parameters of any call is must.
- Last but not least: Know your response XML. You must understand the XML structure for sure. If you can get a parser for xml returned by amazon, well & good. Otherwise you must be very good at logic and parse the xml on you own writing some class for it.
A good solution must post proper-correct request parameter and will be handling the response to transform it correctly to your desired form i.e. database, csv etc. Hourly, Daily or Weekly synchronization must be accomplished with appropriate request parameters to get updated/latest data only thus improving the communication time.
