Welcome to Product Advertising API 5.0

Topics

• Overview of Product Advertising API
• What's New in Product Advertising API 5.0
• Audience
• Required Knowledge and Skills

Overview of Product Advertising API

Amazon has developed a world-class web service that millions of customers use every day. As a developer, you can build Product Advertising API applications that leverage this robust, scalable, and reliable technology. You get access to a lot of the data used by Amazon including the items for sale, customer reviews, seller reviews, as well as most of the functionality you see on Amazon.com, such as finding items, displaying customer reviews, and product promotions. Product Advertising API operations open the doors to Amazon's databases so that you can take advantage of Amazon's sophisticated e-commerce data and functionality. Build your own web store to sell Amazon items or your own items.

Best of all, Product Advertising API is free. By signing up to become a Product Advertising API developer, you join the tens of thousands of developers who are already realizing financial gains by creating Product Advertising API-driven applications and web stores.

What's new in Product Advertising API 5.0

On a high level, Product Advertising API 5.0 offers following new features:

• Ease of integration: Out of the box SDKs in popular languages for easy integration and adoption. The SDKs takes away all the heavy lifting of signing the request, request serialization and response de-serialization.
• Lighter, Slimmer and Faster: PA-API 5.0 is built from ground-up to offer faster response times and uses Resources over ResponseGroups used earlier. PA-API 5.0 supports the lighter and slimmer JSON format over XML supported earlier.
• Better Customer Experience: PA-API 5.0 offers features consistent with Amazon retail like LanguageOfPreference compatibility, PrimeExclusive eligibility, Multiple and intuitive Sales rank information in context of a particular BrowseNode, etc.

Audience

This guide is intended for developers who want to build an e-commerce storefront that sells items listed on Amazon.com, or an application that helps others build e-commerce storefronts.

Required Knowledge and Skills

Use of this guide assumes you are familiar with the following:

• JSON (For an overview, see W3 Schools JSON Introduction.)

• Basic understanding of HTTP Methods, specifically POST as Product Advertising API uses POST (For an overview, see HTTP Methods)

• Basic understanding of web services (For an overview, see JSON Web Services.)

If you are an Amazon Associate and are looking for general information, see Amazon Associates Tools for Every Site.