If you’re an eCommerce specialist, marketer, developer, or data analyst working in the eCommerce industry, you are no doubt familiar with the Amazon Selling Partner API.
Sometimes known as Amazon Sellers API, Seller Central API, or even just SP-API, the Amazon Selling Partner API replaced the Amazon Marketplace Web Service (MWS) API in mid-2022 as the key tool for Amazon vendors to connect to and access their Amazon data.
But what exactly is SP-API, how does it work, and what data can you get from it? In this blog, we explain just that!
What is Amazon SP-API?
Simply put, Amazon SP-API is a set of tools that lets Amazon vendors automatically access and manage their Amazon data. You can check things like what you’re selling, what sales you have, how you’re getting paid, and various other important data without doing it all by hand. And, according to Amazon, is generally better, faster, and more secure than its predecessor.
What sort of metrics can I get from Amazon SP-API?
With Amazon SP-API, you can access various types of data related to your Amazon seller account and marketplace activities, including:
- Inventory Data
Information about the products you're selling on Amazon, such as their names, descriptions, prices, and stock levels.- Order Data
Details about orders placed by customers, including order IDs, items purchased, shipping addresses, and payment status.- Product Listing Data
Data related to your product listings on Amazon, such as images, titles, bullet points, and product identifiers.- Sales Data
Reports on your sales performance, including revenue, units sold, refunds, and other sales-related metrics.- Fulfillment Data
Information about the fulfillment of your orders, such as shipment tracking numbers, delivery dates, and shipping carrier information.- Account Data
Details about your seller account, such as account health metrics, fee statements, and account-level settings.
How can marketers best leverage SP-API?
Good question. Overall, eCommerce Marketers can use the SP-API to make data-driven decisions, automate repetitive tasks, personalize marketing efforts, and track performance more effectively, ultimately driving better results for their campaigns and businesses. Here are just a few examples:
Data-Driven Insights
By accessing data on listings, orders, and sales performance, marketers can gain valuable insights into customer behavior, popular products, and market trends. This information can inform marketing strategies, such as targeting specific products or demographics more effectively.
Automated Campaign Management
SP-API enables marketers to automate campaign management processes, such as adjusting ad spend based on inventory levels or launching targeted promotions for certain products or customer segments. This automation saves time and ensures campaigns are always optimized for maximum impact.
Personalized Messaging
With access to customer order data, marketers can create personalized marketing messages and recommendations tailored to individual customer preferences and purchase history. This personalized approach can improve customer engagement and drive higher conversion rates.
Inventory Management Integration
Marketers can sync inventory data from SP-API with their marketing systems to ensure that campaigns are aligned with product availability. This integration helps prevent advertising products that are out of stock and enables marketers to promote products with higher inventory levels.
Performance Tracking and Reporting
SP-API provides access to detailed performance metrics and reports, allowing marketers to track the effectiveness of their campaigns and measure key performance indicators (KPIs) such as return on ad spend (ROAS) and customer acquisition cost (CAC). This data-driven approach enables marketers to optimize their strategies and allocate resources more efficiently.
What other data can you combine with SP-API data?
So, why stop there? Combining SP-API data with other datasets can provide even deeper insights and enhance the effectiveness of your marketing strategies. For example:
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Data
Integrating SP-API data with CRM data allows you to align customer interactions and sales data. By combining information about customer preferences, purchase history, and behavior from your CRM system with SP-API data, you can create highly targeted marketing campaigns and personalized customer experiences.- Website Analytics Data
Combining SP-API data with website analytics data (e.g., Google Analytics) enables you to understand the entire customer journey, from browsing products on your website to making purchases on Amazon. This holistic view helps you optimize your website's performance, identify areas for improvement, and track the impact of marketing efforts on conversion rates.- Social Media Data
Integrating SP-API data with social media data (e.g., Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics) allows you to analyze the effectiveness of your social media marketing efforts in driving traffic and sales on Amazon. You can track referral traffic from social media platforms, measure engagement metrics, and identify opportunities to optimize your social media campaigns.- Inventory Management Data
Combining SP-API data with inventory management data from your internal systems helps you ensure product availability and prevent stockouts. By syncing inventory levels, you can avoid advertising out-of-stock products, optimize campaign targeting based on inventory availability, and improve overall inventory management efficiency.- Competitor Data
Integrating SP-API data with competitor data from market research tools or competitive intelligence platforms enables you to benchmark your performance against competitors, identify market trends, and uncover opportunities for differentiation. Analyzing competitor pricing, product assortment, and promotional strategies can inform your own pricing and marketing decisions on Amazon.
How to set up SP-API?
Despite everything we have said above, you are unlikely to encounter a few challenges when using SP-API. Not least because integrating SP-API into existing systems and workflows can be complex, especially for users with limited technical expertise. It may require development resources and expertise in working with APIs, authentication mechanisms, and data parsing.
Furthermore, SP-API enforces rate limits and throttling to prevent abuse and ensure fair access to resources. Users need to carefully manage API requests to stay within rate limits and avoid being throttled, which can impact application performance and responsiveness.
Lastly, as with all APIs, SP-API undergoes changes and API updates over time, including changes to endpoints, data structures, or authentication mechanisms. And this means users need to stay informed about API changes and maintain their set-up to ensure compatibility and uninterrupted access to data.
If you want to try and tackle this yourself, then check out Amazon’s Getting Started Guide for a step-by-step.
However, if you want an easier approach check out how Adverity’s integrated data platform can do all this for you and much more by not only automatically collecting your SP-API data but also integrating it with all your other data sources too!
