How to get Amazon Seller Central orders programmatically?

Question

We have been manually been keying Amazon orders into our system and would like to automate it. However, I can't seem to figure out how to go about it. Their documentation is barely there.

There is:

• Amazon Inventory Management (AIM) API: That is supposed to manage orders and inventory
• Event Notification Service (ENS) API: Get order notifications
• Seller Central SOAP API: Upload inventory and manage orders
• Amazon Marketplace Web Service (Amazon MWS): Manage inventory and orders

So, um, which do I use? Using REST instead of SOAP is very much preferred. Can anyone point me out some better documentation/examples?

Answer 1

I think Amazon's API is a confusing mess to deal with. I just wrote a simple tool to extract data from my Amazon wishlist and it was far harder than it should have been.

I would guess that you want to use the Marketplace service, but I could be wrong. If you're dealing with PHP, there is a PHP API that you might find helpful - Tarzan.

Here is a Amazon forum for that should help: http://www.amazonsellercommunity.com/forums/forum.jspa?forumID=32, and a PDF overview

Answer 2

AIM and SOAP are historical APIs. The best choice is MWS, which supports all features of AIM and SOAP (i.e. all listing activity, inventory reports, order reports, order acknowledgement and cancellations, refunds, settlement reports). MWS is also well documented at mws.amazon.com, and example client libraries are provided for Java, C# and PHP. For feed and report formats, you should refer to Seller Central Help pages for all formats (unless you are a Marketplace seller, in which case the help pages are accessible from your seller account page).

You may also want to peruse www.amazonservices.com

Finally, here's a link to the SOA-GuideToXML.pdf document, which describes the details of the XML feeds and reports, as well as the overall workflow:

http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/rainier/help/tutorials/SOA-GuideToXML.pdf