Finding Items Sold by Sellers

Product Advertising API: 2009-11-01

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Finding Items Sold by Sellers

Merchants always sell new or collectible items. To purchase items that are used, refurbished, or out of stock in merchant's inventories, you must purchase from sellers.

Sellers also can sell new and collectible items. Customers sometimes like what specific sellers have for sale. For that reason, it is a good idea to enable customers to find items sold by sellers.

To find items sold by sellers

  • Use the SellerListingSearch operations

You cannot use SellerListingSearch. to return items sold by merchants. You can ItemSearch to find some items sold by sellers. SellerListingSearch, however, returns far more information about seller's items.

Using SellerListingSearch

SellerListingSearch enables you to return all of the items sold by a seller. Optionally, you can filter results by specifying the title of an item or its status. 

http://ecs.amazonaws.com/onca/xml?
Service=AWSECommerceService&
AWSAccessKeyId=[AWS Access Key ID]&
Operation=SellerListingSearch&
SellerId=[A Seller ID]&
Keywords=crystal%20ball&
Sort=+price

This request returns the crystal balls sold by the specified seller. The results are sorted by price.

Word order in the title does not matter and case is not significant. For example, searching for Crystal%20balls is the same as searching for Balls%20Crystal.

[Note] Note

Product Advertising API does not offer an operation that searches for a specific item across all sellers.

Finding Seller IDs

To find your seller ID

  1. Go to http://www.amazon.com.

  2. Click the Your Account tab.

    Your Account web page displays.

  3. Click the Your Seller Account link.

To find someone else's seller ID

  1. Go to http://www.amazon.com.

  2. In the Search field, enter a keyword to search for an item sold by a seller.

  3. On the web page that displays the results of the search, click the Used and New link.

  4. Click a seller's name.

    In the address field of the browser, a URI is displayed. The seller parameter specifies the seller ID.

    http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/seller/at-a-glance.html/ref=olp_offerlisting_1/103-3016905-4117412?ie=UTF8&asin=0976925524&marketplaceSeller=1&seller=A3657B0KL9ZR59

Searching for Out of Stock Items

By default, SellerListingSearch retrieves only products that are available.

To search for discontinued, out of stock, or unavailable products

  • Set the SellerListingSearch parameter, OfferStatus, to "Closed."

For example, if you wanted to see all offers for a video game, you might use a SellerListingSearch request similar to the following.

http://ecs.amazonaws.com/onca/xml?
Service=AWSECommerceService&
AWSAccessKeyId=[ID]&
Operation=SellerListingSearch&
SellerId=[Seller ID]&
Title=[GameTitle]&
OfferStatus=Closed

Returning Historical Pricing

A seller has to determine how much to charge for their items. One way to do that is to look at what similar items have sold for in the past. ItemSearch can return similar items currently for sale. When the seller's item is more like an item that is no longer for sale, the SellerListingSearch operation can be used with OfferStatus equaling "Closed" to return discontinued items and their prices.

Alternatively, Amazon provides a for-pay service called Amazon Historical Pricing. This service provides historical pricing information for the past three years.

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