Amazon is finally bringing its decade-old APIs up to date. Yes! Starting February 2022 and to be concluded within September, Amazon has initiated its transition from the old Amazon Marketplace Web Services (Amazon MWS) APIs to the new Amazon Selling Partner (SP) APIs. This next-generation suite of Amazon Selling Partner APIs will include stricter data usage and protection policies and will have a JSON-based REST API design for automated functionality for sellers, vendors and Amazon merchants. Amazon Selling Partner API will also replace the Amazon Feed Specifications (AFS) API and support sellers in newer categories, selling models and regions.
Why Care About Amazon API Changes – Amazon Selling Partner API
As announced in January 2022, Amazon will be deprecating its existing Amazon MWS and AFS API by September 31st, 2022. This in fact will hugely affect the order, inventory, shipping and payment data that merchants work with to manage the Amazon business. With the hose turned off, Amazon users will have no choice but to migrate to the newer version of the API.
Without REST-based API-led connectivity, Amazon brands may experience:
- An increased time-to-market due to manual processes.
- The inability to scale the business
- Zero content validation and content tally errors
- Reversion to manual processes.
- Inaccurate sales reports
- No real-time pricing/repricing
- Inability to access Amazon Inventory and Shipping data
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Amazon Selling Partner (SP) API – What’s in Store
An API or an Application Programming Interface is a software language that allows applications, servers and computers to talk to each other easily. In the case of Amazon APIs, these are what enable multiple business apps to gather data from Amazon, from inventory management to analytics to customer feedback. The Amazon API makes the transfer of data possible through set protocols and also interprets the data so that both or multiple applications can work in tandem with them.
With the launch of the new RESTful Amazon Selling Partner API, the platform aims at making it easier for Amazon Selling Partner developers/third-party app developers/marketplace sellers to develop and integrate their APIs in order to fetch data directly from Amazon. Since its inception, this will be the first time that Amazon will allow developers to build software specifically for 1P merchants. With its improved security (OAuth2.0) and a dedicated sandbox for testing, Amazon Selling Partner API provides improved consistency, ease and vendor support, resulting in better messaging and notifications, B2B offerings and MFN order status.
The Amazon SP API will also provide support to the Services merchants and make the sales data more accurate. Hosting A+ content, pricing and Amazon shipping automation, this API change will benefit the FBA sellers from inventory and inbound eligibility checks as well as small and light support.
In addition to this, with the new Amazon SP APIs, there are also changes in the terms of buyer data security – new tokens API will be introduced which will protect the personal identifiable information (PII) of the buyers. Also, according to the Amazon migration guide, developers will gain new SP API authorization tokens instead of the previously used MWS tokens.
Amazon Selling Partner API – The Next Step
With the introduction of the new REST APIs, Amazon has brought to the table a set of new features, functionalities and convenience for its users. A lot has changed for Amazon, and third-party apps are quickly trying to adopt this change as well. According to Amazon, all migration to the new Amazon SP API is to be completed within September 2022, post which the platform will discontinue support for the MWS APIs. On July 31st, Amazon already phased out the support for 3 of its APIs which affected the MWS and SP-API developers who list their apps on the Seller Central Partner Network (SCPN). These 3 APIs were:
- Orders API
- Reports API
- Merchant Fulfillment API
As announced on the Sellers Forums, Amazon will then bring forth another API change on September 30th and will deprecate 2 more APIs, namely:
- Catalog Items
- Listing Items
Post this change, a majority of Amazon sellers, merchants and developers will be affected and would be mandated to migrate to the new SP APIs. Third-party applications that are being used to either simplify Amazon or integrate it with other applications will also need to revise their API logic in order to maintain a seamless flow of data to and from Amazon. Sellers integrating directly with the MWS API will not face changes for this migration, since most of the apps are built in-house, however, for merchants using third-party integration and automation tools like APPSeCONNECT, that support the new Amazon Selling Partner APIs, migrating to the new set of APIs would be the most prudent thing to do in order to run a streamlined and scalable business with Amazon.
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