Before your customer can purchase a product, you must find out which vendors are offering the product for sale.
In ECS, an offer is the data associated with a vendor offering a product for sale in a specific condition (new, used, refurbished or collectible).
Offer listings are the current price/availability for various shipping methods.
If there are no offer listings for an item, that item cannot be purchased. If the offer listing's availability does not begin with the words "Usually ships" (US) or equivalent (UK, DE, JP), then the product cannot be purchased.
Unlike the ASIN, which is a permanent identifier, offers and offer listings are more transient data specified by a vendor with available stock at a certain price. For this reason, offers should not be stored locally for long periods of time.
You can get a summary of availability for different product conditions and available quantities for all vendors (including Amazon). The Amazon database divides product conditions into four categories:
New
Used
Refurbished
Collectible
You can use the OfferSummary response group with an ItemLookup, ItemSearch, SimilarityLookup or ListLookup operation to get an overview of whether there are offers available for each product condition and the lowest price in each category, as shown in the table below.
If you are only interested in New inventory, then Items/Item/OfferSummary/TotalNew will indicate how many vendors are offering this product for sale in new condition.
Children of the OfferSummary element
| Description | ||
|---|---|---|
| Items/Item/OfferSummary/ | ||
| LowestCollectiblePrice/ | Lowest price for a collectible version of this product with child elements that contain the price. | |
| LowestNewPrice/ | Lowest price for a new product with child elements that contain the price. | |
| LowestRefurbishedPrice/ | Lowest price for a refurbished product with child elements that contain the price. | |
| LowestUsedPrice/ | Lowest price for a used product with child elements that contain the price. | |
| TotalCollectible | Number of offers for this product, in collectible condition. If TotalCollectible > 0 then LowestCollectiblePrice is the lowest price among these offers. | |
| TotalNew | Number of offers for this product, in new condition. If TotalNew > 0 then LowestNewPrice is the lowest price among these offers. | |
| TotalRefurbished | Number of offers for this product, refurbished. If TotalRefurbished > 0 then LowestRefurbishedPrice is the lowest price among these offers. | |
| TotalUsed | Number of offers for this product, used. If TotalUsed > 0 then LowestUsedPrice is the lowest price among these offers. |
There are two ways to select a specific item for purchase:
For Amazon products, offer listings are identified by the ASIN
For other vendors, offer listings are identified by the OfferListingId
You may do an ItemLookup, ItemSearch, SimilarityLookup or ListLookup operation with the ResponseGroup parameter set to OfferFull or Offers in order to see all of the available offers and offer listings by vendors willing to sell a given product.
The table below shows the data returned in the Offers/Offer and Offers/Offer/OfferListing elements. Note that you must refer to the Offers/Offer/OfferListing/Condition element to determine whether the product is New, Used, Refurbished or Collectible.
The data in Offers and OfferListing elements
| Description | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Offers/ | One instance for each product. | |||
| TotalOffers | Total number of offers available. | |||
| TotalOfferPages | Number of pages of offers (10 offers per page). | |||
| Offer/ | Multiple instances - one per vendor. | |||
| Merchant/ | The vendor who has made the offer. US only. UK, DE and JP do not have MerchantId elements, only SellerId elements. | |||
| MerchantId | ||||
| Name | ||||
| GlancePage | A GlancePage is not returned when the merchant is Amazon. | |||
| Seller/ | ||||
| SellerId | ||||
| SellerName | ||||
| Nickname | ||||
| GlancePage | ||||
| About | ||||
| MoreAbout | ||||
| Location/ | City, state and country where the seller is located. | |||
| AverageFeedbackRating | Average customer feedback rating where 1=poor, 5=excellent. | |||
| TotalFeedback | Number of customers who have provided feedback about this seller's service. | |||
| OfferAttributes/ | ||||
| Condition | New, used, refurbished or collectible. | |||
| SubCondition | ||||
| ConditionNote | ||||
| OfferListing/ | Possibly multiple instances, one per shipping method offered by the vendor. | |||
| OfferListingId | Used to add this product to the shopping cart (non-Amazon vendors). | |||
| Price/ | Actual price for which this product is available with child elements that contain the price. | |||
| SalePrice/ | If this element is returned, then the item is currently available for a special lower price. Child elements contain the price. | |||
| Availability | If this element does not begin with the words "Usually ships" (US) or equivalent (UK, DE, JP), then the product cannot be purchased. | |||
| IsEligibleForSuperSaverShipping | This element is provided for only Amazon offers and has a value of 1 if the item is eligible and 0 if the item is not eligible. | |||
| ISPUStoreAddress/ | If the item is available, this is the address of a store where pickup is available. | |||
| ISPUStoreHours | Hours of the store where pickup is available. |