Do I have to write an API in order to interact with Amazon MWS?

Question

I have been trying to write a program to that retrieves and organizes data from the Amazon MWS API in an automated, streamlined way. I am confused about the actual method of achieving this though, should I be trying to write my own API to retrive data from Amazon or is there another approach to this?

Answer 1

Yes, there is an SDK for C# like Charlie mentions. It does all the heavy lifting, you just create a request and send it through. One great thing about the SDK is that it handles the signing of the request for you, otherwise you have to do it yourself.

It is not a RESTful API though, it's all based on SOAP and everything is a POST. And it's all XML. But if you use the SDK, it handles the deserialization for you. Check out the scratchpad which is a great test tool and a look at what the SDK does for you.

Answer 2

No, you don't need to write an API to call an API (you might want to though, depending on your end use case).

It looks to me like Amazon MWS is just a rest API, so you need to write a program which uses it. Here's an example of doing so in C#.

I'd also suggest taking a look at the Amazon MWS Developer Guides, it looks like there some useful information in there to get you started.

Good luck!

Answer 3

It depends who is going to be customer for your solution. If it's for app's self consumption, you don't need to expose any APIs. If you are planning to develop a web site to present then you may write APIs to access APIs. Still you can get way without implementing any left side APIs.