How does one find prices from Amazon's site programmatically?

Question

So Amazon has lots of different APIs for different things, and it's hard to find the one I'm looking for.

I have a client that sells things and checks Amazon's lowest price to know where to price their things (slightly under the lowest thing there). They want functionality integrated into their inventory system that would automatically find the product's lowest price on Amazon and display that. I was wondering which AWS service is best suited to this task.

I see the Product Advertising API, and that looks like the closest thing right now. Is that so?

I don't really want to rely on a scraper when Amazon provides a programmatic interface to this information somewhere, which I know they do because many other products have this. Some say that they can just download a dump of Amazon's products and use that locally -- I'm open to that option too if anyone can point me in its direction.

Answer 1

this is a good place to start http://aws.amazon.com/, anything else through a non-published api will most likely be fragile (i.e. scraping).

Answer 2

Yes, the technically appropriate API is the Product Advertising API, using the ItemLookup/ItemSearch operations or the Seller* operations.

https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/advertising/api/detail/main.html

I would also advise you to check the licensing agreement for this API, notably clause 4 (i).