Introduction to Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS)

ECS is an API that allows you to access Amazon data and functionality through a Web site or Web-enabled application. ECS follows the standard Web services model: users of the service request data through XML over HTTP (REST) or SOAP and data is returned by the service as an XML-formatted stream of text.

Throughout this programming guide, we will include REST examples that you can use with your browser to quickly and easily see how to formulate calls to ECS and review the results. We recommend that you review this documentation with an Internet-enabled computer so that you can try out ECS requests as you go and immediately see the power and flexibility of ECS.

ECS is currently incorporated in thousands of Web sites and applications around the world in many different ways. The Planning Guide describes some of those ways and provides sample sites that you can visit. In addition, Amazon partners use ECS for competitive pricing, inventory management, and many other online retailing tasks.

ECS is available for all Amazon sites:

Selecting a Web Services Access Method

You have two options for accessing ECS:

Locale-Specific Features

Locale-specific features are listed below.

Feature Locale limitations
Amazon product database The products available on the different sites vary greatly.
Identifiers The identifiers used on each site are unique to that site. The names and usage of the identifiers is common to all sites, but their values are different. For example, the identifier (ASIN) for a book will be different for each site.
Customer-supplied content Reviews supplied by customers are stored only on the site where they were created.
Customer information Customer accounts exist on the site where they were created, and are not available through other sites. So customers with a JP account cannot purchase products on the DE site without creating a new account. Customer information such as wishlists are available only on the site where the customer has their account.
Merchants Merchants are large Amazon partners (typically large retailers) with extensive product lines available through the Amazon Web sites.Merchants@ are in the US locale only. SDP Merchants@ are in the DE, UK, and JP locales.
In-store pickup US only.
Variations US and Japan.