A Conceptual Overview of the Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS) Data Model

There are two types of data available through ECS:

  1. Amazon product data. The bulk of the Amazon catalog of products is available through ECS. There are three ways to consider the Amazon product data as returned by ECS.

    1. The Offers Model. Amazon's Web sites carry products from many vendors. A given product may be available through more than one vendor, on different terms and conditions, at a different price and in a different condition (new, used, etc.). If you are interested in offering Amazon products for sale, you must work with these product offers to get current price and availability.

      Image: ECS offers data model

    2. The Variations Model. Some products such as apparel and sporting goods are not available in a single version. For these products, you must specify other variation values such as size and color before purchasing the product. If you wish to work with multi-version products, you must be able to extract variation information from ECS.

      Image: ECS variations data model

    3. Item Images and Attributes. Every product in ECS consists of images of the product as well as a set of attributes, which varies by product type. ECS has over 200 different attribute fields to completely describe items in each product line.

  2. Other data. ECS provides access to other data that is adjunct to the product catalog. Through ECS, you can retrieve individual wish lists and listmania lists as well as basic public information about customers. You can also access seller product listings and customer feedback about individual sellers.