Seamus at RepricerExpress unsurprisingly keeps his eye on changes to Amazon’s API. Today he’s got some great information on how Amazon keep you informed of price changes to your competitors prices:
Amazon has just released a new API they are calling the Subscriptions API. Developers and Merchants can now subscribe to the “AnyOfferChanged” which Amazon defines as:
“The AnyOfferChanged notification is sent whenever there is a price change or offer listing change for any of the top 20 offers, by condition (new or used), for an item that you sell. The top 20 offers are determined by the landed price, which is the price plus shipping. If multiple sellers are charging the same landed price, the results will be returned in random order.
You will only receive AnyOfferChanged notifications for items for which you have active offers. You cannot subscribe to notifications for items for which you do not have active offers”.
So, what does that mean for merchants? You’ll receive a file with the top 20 sellers data when any of the top 20 (new or used) changes price—this can then be used to re-price your items.
To use the API, you or your repricing software solution will need to be using Amazon SQS cloud service. The possible advantages for sellers include:
- Seeing all of the prices from top 20 rather than groups. Will allow repricing software (that uses the new API) to price more accurately when best price is used.
- Ignore or include certain sellers from competition
- Set a different ‘beat by’ when competing with the competition
- The extra data could provide extra pricing rules, for example, ignore sellers from countries / states / sellers feed back / offers expedited shipping etc.
- 1 call to Amazon to make instead of 2 to find out featured merchants
- Ability to find out what price (pricing analysis)
Whilst it remains to be seen how the new Subscriptions API will impact repricing costs, reliability and frequency (has throttling limits like the Products API) there is little doubt it will make repricing software even better and more accurate for sellers who use those solutions that integrate with it.
Amazon repricing providers like RepricerExpress already have their development team busy integrating the new API into its software to give its users a further competitive advantage in the Amazon marketplace.
