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Very disappointing experience working with Amazon.com’s Seller Central APIs. Their documentation is frankly very bad. Undocumented and incorrectly documented aspects will make the curve to get this working unnecassarily steep. Their support is not responsive. The forums are not overly helpful although you can see similar issues coming up. Disappointing for such a large and groundbreaking web-based company, especially as they are looking to promote their Web Services infrastructure to developers.

The comments in this article are very accurate of my thoughts/experience implementing Amazon’s Seller Central SOAP API using PHP (they are using Java) …

My time getting to the ‘hello world’ stage on this interface was measured in days vs minutes for pretty much every other system I have worked with.

Good notes on implementing Amazon’s Seller Central SOAP API

That article should help anyone regardless of the particular language they are using to do this. It helped me with one important final aspect that was undocumented by Amazon.

For more specific notes on doing this with PHP check out the last chapter of this book …

The Web Developer’s Guide To Amazon E-Commerce Service

A couple of key things in there will overcome issues with the particular way the Amazon SOAP server works. There will still be problems - but that will get you much of the way.

Note: don’t waste your time with Amazon AIM. As the article above mentions, unless you have an old account migrated from Amazon’s Marketplace system it will only work to download reports - it will not allow adding or updating products.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 8:29 pm and is filed under amazon, coding, php, rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.