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www.amazon.com lists hundreds of thousands of items for sale. Most of these items are warehoused and sold by Amazon or other large merchants, such as Nordstrom. All of these items are part of the Amazon marketplace.
In addition to large merchants selling items, individuals and companies also sell items that can be found using www.amazon.com. Some of these sellers have their own storefront on Amazon and their items can only be found in their store. Most sellers, however, list their items in the Amazon marketplace as well as in their stores.
Product Advertising API operations only enable you to retrieve items that are stored by Amazon. Product Advertising API does not enable you to add items for sale to Amazon. Sellers, such as Amazon Advantage sellers, who do add items to Amazon's catalog do so under a separate agreement.
All items for sale on www.amazon.com have identifiers. There are four major kinds. The first two identify items regardless of whether or not they can be purchased:
ASIN—Amazon Standard Item Number
An alphanumeric token that uniquely identifies items in the Amazon marketplace.
All items in the marketplace have an ASIN. This is, by far, the most common identifier. ASINs are used by the majority of Product Advertising API operations.
ListingId—An alphanumeric token that uniquely identifies items in a Pro Merchant Seller's store, called a zShop, or a Merchant@'s store
Listing IDs are much rarer. They are assigned to items sold by Pro Merchant Sellers who sell items in their own stores.
The second two identifiers identify items that can actually be purchased:
OfferListingId—An alphanumeric token that uniquely identifies items in the Amazon marketplace that can be purchased
All items in the marketplace that can be purchased have an OfferListingId. This is, by far, the most common identifier for items that can be purchased.
ExchangeId—An alphanumeric token that uniquely identifies items for sale in a Pro Merchant Seller's zShop, or a Merchant@'s store that can be purchased
ExchangeIds are much rarer than OfferListingIds because few items on www.amazonn.com are only available in a seller's store.
Amazon has other item identifiers but these are rarer and they can be used in fewer Product Advertising API operations:
UPC—Universal Product Code
A 12-digit item identifier used in the US and CA locales. The UPC is identifier used in barcodes.
EAN—European Article Number
A 13-digit equivalent of the UPC that is used in Europe for products and barcodes.
JAN—Japanese Article Number
The equivalent of the EAN that is used in Japan for products and barcodes.
ISBN—International Standardized Book Number
An alphanumeric token that uniquely identifies a book. A book's EAN is typically set equal to the book's ISBN.
SKU—Stock Keeping Unit
A merchant-specific identifier for a purchasable good, like a shirt or chair. Amazon's version of the SKU is the ASIN.
Amazon assigns items with SKUs an ASIN. If you had to search by SKU only, you would have to search each merchant's items independently because SKUs are not unique across all merchants. Several Product Advertising API operations enable you to search by SKU but the merchant must also be identified in the same request.
All items in the Amazon marketplace have an ASIN even if they also have one of the preceding identifiers. Only a few Product Advertising API operations can use these identifiers. That functionality is presented as a convenience function. You would typically only use one of these identifiers if you knew it but did not know the item's ASIN.
The validity of these identifiers varies by search index, as shown in the following table.
| Search Index | UPC | EAN | SKU |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apparel | Y | Y | Y |
| Automotive | Y | Y | Y |
| Automotive | Y | Y | Y |
| Baby | Y | Y | Y |
| Beauty | Y | Y | Y |
| Books | Y | Y | Y |
| Classical | Y | Y | Y |
| DigitalMusic | Y | N | N |
| DVD | Y | Y | Y |
| Electronics | Y | Y | Y |
| HealthPersonalCare | Y | Y | Y |
| HomeGarden | Y | Y | Y |
| Industrial | Y | Y | Y |
| Jewelry | Y | Y | Y |
| Kitchen | Y | Y | Y |
| Magazines | N | Y | Y |
| Merchants | N | N | Y |
| Miscellaneous | Y | Y | Y |
| Music | Y | Y | Y |
| MusicalInstruments | Y | Y | Y |
| MusicTracks | N | N | N |
| OfficeProducts | Y | Y | Y |
| OutdoorLiving | Y | Y | Y |
| PCHardware | Y | Y | Y |
| PetSupplies | Y | Y | Y |
| Photo | Y | Y | Y |
| Software | Y | Y | Y |
| Tools | Y | Y | Y |
| Toys | Y | Y | Y |
| VHS | Y | Y | Y |
| Video | Y | Y | Y |
| Watches | Y | Y | Y |
The following table shows the valid identifiers by locale.
| Locale | Valid Item Identifiers |
|---|---|
CA
| ASIN, EAN, SKU |
DE
| ASIN, EAN, SKU |
FR
| ASIN, SKU, UPC |
JP
| ASIN, EAN, JAN, SKU |
UK
| ASIN, SKU, UPC |
US
| ASIN, ISBN, SKU, UPC |
The default value of
IdType
is ASIN. For non-ASIN searches, including searches by ISBN, JAN, SKU, UPC, and
EAN, a variety of additional parameters become mandatory, including a value for
IdType.
