What is Amazon MWS?
Amazon Marketplace Web Service (Amazon MWS) is an integrated web service API that helps Amazon sellers to programmatically exchange data on listings, orders, payments, reports and more. Data integration with Amazon enables high levels of selling automation, which can help sellers grow their business. By using Amazon MWS, sellers can increase selling efficiency, reduce labour requirements and improve response time to customers.
There are no fees associated with Amazon MWS, but to use the Amazon MWS API you must have an Amazon MWS-eligible seller account and you must register to use Amazon MWS.
What Amazon MWS Provides
With Amazon MWS, you can build applications for your own Amazon seller account. You can also build applications for other sellers to help them manage their online business. Using Amazon MWS you can create applications that look up products for sale, download orders for fulfilment, confirm shipment, and schedule and receive reports. These API operations are accessible by using a web service interface.
Amazon MWS provides the following features:
- Inventory management – You can perform batch uploads of inventory, add products, check inventory levels, examine pricing information, and other inventory management tasks.
- Order management – You can download order information, obtain payment data, acknowledge orders and schedule reports.
- Reports management – You can request a variety of reports as well as query the status of these reports, and then download them.
For Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) sellers, Amazon MWS also allows you to:
- Create inbound shipments to an Amazon fulfilment centre – You can automate the process for creating labels for units you ship to a fulfilment centre.
- Check status of inbound shipments – You can check to see if your shipment has reached a fulfilment centre and, if so, whether the shipment has been processed.
- Submit fulfilment orders – By integrating your system with Amazon MWS, you can enable your customers to submit multi-channel fulfilment orders at any time. There is no lag time while you process or batch orders.
- Track and manage outbound shipment requests – Once orders have left an Amazon fulfilment centre, you can track shipments and keep your customers aware of arrival times.