The Amazon Web sites enable product sales from Amazon plus many other vendors. The products available through the Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS) draw from this huge inventory and include a majority of the products available on an Amazon Web site. ECS is available for all of the Amazon sites:
US (amazon.com)
UK (amazon.co.uk)
Germany (amazon.de)
Japan (amazon.co.jp)
France (amazon.fr)
Canada (amazon.ca)
Through ECS, you can access:
Product data: Product data includes information about product availability and pricing for items in the Amazon catalog.
Content from customers: Content from customers include reviews, wish lists, and listmania lists.
Seller information: Seller information includes general information and customer feedback about the wide range of vendors on the Amazon site.
Marketplace product listings: A great number of third-party products are available, including products sold by smaller vendors on the Amazon Web sites.
Shopping carts: Use ECS to manage shopping carts of products for purchase through Amazon. This allows you to receive commissions on sales that originate with your Web site or application.
Amazon data that cannot be seen includes:
Copyrighted or proprietary data that is owned by a third party who has not given permission for their data to be available through ECS
A small amount of other data that Amazon has excluded for technical or proprietary reasons
ECS is a read-only system--that is, product data cannot be sent back to Amazon via ECS. The only data that is transmitted back to Amazon is information about the shopping cart and its contents, to allow the customer to complete their purchase. So you cannot, for example, use ECS to allow customers to create wish lists or reviews and submit them to the Amazon Web site. Additionally, if you are selling products through amazon.com, you cannot use ECS to define new products or manage your inventory, you must use the Automated Inventory Management System (AIMS) or other tools on Amazon.com (see http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/1161232/.