Estimated sales report generation through Amazon API (MWS – Marketplace API)

What is MWS?

MWS (MarketPlace Web Service) is a specific service for people who sell on Amazon.com. It provides sellers with an API through which they can access their Amazon account from within their own computing systems.

The Amazon Marketplace Web Service (Amazon MWS) Fulfilment API sections include operations that allow sellers to access Amazon’s services through a simple web service interface and can build innovative web or desktop software for better analysis and decision making taking help of custom software companies.

MWS helps sellers to automate orders, listings, reports, payments and many more features. Seller can integrate Amazon marketplace into their current applications and workflow by exchanging data.

For everyone Amazon storefront enabled with MWS, there are 4 different keys that tell Amazon exactly which store you’re uploading data to. These are :

• AccessKeyId
• SecretAccessKeyId
• MerchantId
• MarketplaceId

What is Estimated Sales Report?

Estimated Sales Report is used for getting the list of items that are sold on amazon even though there settlement report are not yet generated. The settlement report is generated after 15 days so it is not possible to calculate profit/loss real time. Estimated Sales Report comes to rescue here. It helps to generate sales report real time.

Process for using Amazon API to generate Estimated Sales Report

• First step is to call ReportRequest method from MWS. Start_Date and End_Date are passed as parameter. Default value is current date and time. This returns the data from where the last settlement report was generated. This method will return the ReportRequestId List.
• Second step is to call the GetReportRequestList method recursively until the ReportRequestId field has status “_DONE_”. When we get the matched status for the ReportRequestId, it returns the List of GeneratedReportId.
• Check that the GeneratedReportId is present in our system to avoid duplicate entry and use GetReportRequest method to generate the report. If the GeneratedReportId is not present in the system we use the GetReportRequest and we  pass GeneratedReportId as the parameter. It returns data in XML format.
• Deserialize the output to get desired output. Use that data and save it in the system. Developers allow this function to run automatically every hour to receive latest data regularly. Profit/loss report thus generated is more accurate and latest.
• The Estimate sales report includes recent orders regardless of whether they have been shipped. Estimated sales report provides important information like amazon order id, the selling price, Amazon service charges, title of the item, ASIN of the item, status of the item (i.e shipped, unshipped, cancelled or pending), the date and time of the item sold and the sellerSku of the item. SellerSku provides information on which customer has scanned the item for selling the item to the amazon.

Process flow diagram

Conclusion

Estimated sales report provides very important information about items that are sold through Amazon regularly. This provides analytical information for better decision making and provides these information real time making it very useful to sellers. Real time profit/loss information, customer information, sales information becomes handy.