How to check inventory of another seller/merchant in Amazon MWS

Question

I have been developing a web application using Amazon MWS. I want to add a feature in my application that is, to track the inventory of seller/merchant. i.e. if we are 'seller A' and competitor is 'seller B' we need to see their inventory on our application.

Is this possible?

Answer 1

Is it possible?

In short: No.

Long version: MWS is an API to work with your own merchant data on Amazon. You cannot see information that originates from other merchants. You can't see their stocked quantities, you can't see their prices etc.

Other APIs such as the Product Advertising API do something entirely different. They let you access the stuff Amazon shows on its webpage, pretty much the same as a browser would, only in XML form. To some degree this information will be data originating from yourself, other data will come from other sellers. You can do an ItemLookup and see who (else) is selling a product, and at which price. You can specify which response groups (parts of the available data) you are interested in. However, none of those include TotalNew attribute per merchant. So unless you know the stocked quantities of every merchant but one specific seller, you can't tell who is stocking which quantity. I know the website shows if a seller's stock is below 20 items - I don't think any API does the same.

Answer 2

I currently use a web based application that tells me the inventory of any seller as long as it's under 1,000 ... this is a great way to track your competitors sales

Basically, you check the inventory of one of your competitors... then check it again the next day... and however many have been sold will show by the reduction of their inventory (the have 525 today... tomorrow they have 500.... they've sold 25 in one day (525-500=25)

Not sure how it's done but seems accurate as I gave ASIN's of products I sold and the numbers matched for sales

Answer 3

It's not possible through an API. There are third party services that you can subscribe to that will get you this information and we have used them in the past. They screen-scrape Amazon every day at certain intervals, store the data, and then report on it for you. Amazon is cracking down on this type of activity, so not sure how long these services will be in business. It's my hope that they open this up and provide it through the GetCompetitivePricingForSKU or GetLowestOfferListingsForSKU operations, or even through their AnyOfferChangedNotification subscription. But I'm not guessing it's likely.

Right now, if we really want to know how much a competitor has of a certain SKU, we go to Amazon, and enter a high value in the quantity box and hope it tells us that they only have xx number in stock. If it's Amazon.com selling the product, it may or may not be accurate. They don't always tell you the truth.