Building software for Amazon businesses is hard.

There is the data Amazon gives you, and then there is the data they don't.

But if you don't know where to look, you'll spend months spinning in circles and never build software that actually makes a difference.

So if you have ever thought about building an Amazon tool, or hiring someone to improve your internal operations, this post is for you.

I'll list all the APIs and what they're best for.

CONTEXT:

There are not a lot of Amazon marketplace software developers that truly understand the end to end picture. What's the data that Amazon provides to you, what's the data that Amazon doesn't. You consider hiring a contractor, or perhaps a full time developer to improve your systems but you don't want to risk time and capital.

I have seen this story play out. I know of companies that have spent seven figures and have been forced to scrap the whole thing.

On the flip side, SmartScout launched with $25k spent and two months dev time. We built something good enough 75 people paid on the first day. While I would love for this to be the full story, I spent 7 years as an Amazon developer for my selling business.

Now. For the list.

Amazon Selling Partner-API (SP-API). This is the core API for getting information from your selling business. This now has merged for both 3P and 1P sellers. You get order information. FBA information. You can make content updates, submit feeds, check products and lots of stuff.

What you don't get.... Keyword data, review data, information on competition such as price history/buy box.

Amazon advertising API. Because Amazon wanted to make a new API and force sellers/developers to manage data in two places. This has all advertising data. All of it. They've put soooo much resources into this. It's very active.

Product Advertising API. This is an amazing API. So amazing that sellers aren't allowed to use it. It's for affiliates. If you try and use this for your selling business, be prepared to get kicked off. I've been kicked out.... like 10 times.

SmartScout API. This is basically our data. It can be your data. It's not free. I owe people money.

Keepa API. A great API for pricing and sales rank history. It's amazing what they have here, it's also amazing what they don't have. The pricing scales with you. Very pricey if you want to scale.

Rainforest API. This is a great API for getting all types of search results. It can get expensive but you definitely can build something off of this. I probably wouldn't build an Amazon wide tool, would be prohibitively expensive. Also, new ownership. You ruined the amazing UX this had. Seriously. It's clunky.

Jungle Scout API. They have a variety of APIs with Cobalt and others. High quality.

Merchant Words API. Excellent if you just want keyword data. I've seen this tested out. It's good.

SellerApp. I've heard good things. I've tested it as well. A wide variety of things you can do with it.

If you want to hoof it yourself. You can always leverage all the proxy and scrapers out of Eastern Europe. They're good.

If you want to hoof it yourself and pay the least amount of possible. You can build your own scraper farm. Here's the thing... the amount of time you'd spend and payment to servers, you might as well just use an API. Trust me. This is the last decade of my life. You don't wanna play Amazon's captcha game.

If you made it here, give yourself a break. Go take a 5 minute walk. This was a lot to write. Send it to your dev team and hopefully we all build applications that replace our jobs. Wait... don't do that.