Using Offer Information
The Offers resource contains various resources which return information related to offer listings and summaries for an item.
When you visit any product's page on Amazon Retail Website, the Buy Box winner offer (if one exists) of the product is displayed. On Amazon Retail Website's Product Page, the BuyBox Winner offer (i.e. the best offer recommended by Amazon for any product) for the product is displayed as (Things highlighted in red boxes show important offer information):
The offer returned by Product Advertising API for a product is the BuyBox Winner offer (if one exists for the product) i.e. the best offer recommended by Amazon for any product.
In cases when there is no BuyBox winner for a given product, the Product Advertising API returns the first offer from the sorted list of all available offers for the product for the given offer condition. In such a case, the product detail page on Amazon Retail Website does not showcase price information and rather displays a text link saying "Available from these sellers" or "See All Buying Options" (See image below):
To check whether the offer is a Buy Box Winner offer or not, check the IsBuyBoxWinner flag under Offer Listings by requesting the Offers.Listings.IsBuyBoxWinner resource. For more information, refer Offers resource.
The following table contains several use-cases on how to consume and best use the offer information returned via Product Advertising API after requesting Offers resources.
| Use Case | Description |
|---|---|
| Determining Price, Merchant, Condition and Delivery Information | Items for sale on Amazon has offer listing(s). An offer listing for an item can be returned by using Offers resources and contains important offer related attributes. |
| Determining Offer Summaries | Though the Product Landing Page of any item displays only the BuyBox winner (if one exists), there are multiple offer listings available for the item across Merchants, Condition, etc. Summary of all available offer listings is returned as Offer Summaries. |
| Determining Availability | Only items that are available on Amazon can be added to cart and purchased by the end customer. Hence, determining Product Availability is very crucial. Availability information of an offer listing is returned as part of Offer Availability. |
| Items that do not have offers | There are some items for which Offer information is not present and you get nothing in return under Offers when you request any of the Offers resources. |