Product Sequence Limitations for Amazon MWS

Question

I am currently working on a specification of a software component that will synchronize an e-commerce product catalog with Amazon Marketplace using Amazon MWS.

According to the documentation of the MWS developer, product publishing requires sending up to 6 different channels that are processed asynchronously:

• Product Feed: Defines SKU and contains descriptive data for products.
• Inventory feed: sets the quantity / availability for each SKU
• Price: sets prices for SKU
• Image feed: product images for each SKU
• Feed Feed: Defines mappings between parent SKUs (e.g. T-Shirt) and child SKUs (e.g. T-Shirt in a specific size and color that you can buy)
• Ovverride Feed:

My question is about the following passage in the MWS documentation:

A product feed is the first step in setting up your products on Amazon. All subsequent catalog channels depend on the success of this channel.

I wonder what that means? There are at least two possibilities:

• Do you need to wait until the product feed has been successfully processed before sending further channels? This would mean that you had to periodically request processing status until it was completed. This can take hours, depending on the channel size and server load on Amazon. The product synchronization process will be more complex.

• Can you send all the channels at once in one sequence, and will Amazon ensure that they are processed in a reasonable manner? In this interpretation, the documentation would simply state the obvious that the let say success of image processing for a particular SKU depends on the success of inserting the SKU itself.

Answer 1

As I understand it, for all other feeds other than the Product feed, the products in question should already be in the catalog, so your first opportunity is the right one.

However, this should only affect you when you first start the product feed or when adding a new product, since once the product is there, you can start channels in any order if you do not use PurgeAndReplace of your entire catalog every time it is not recommended.

How do I plan to do this.

1) Run the Feed Feed of the entire catalog for the first time and wait for it to complete.

2) Launch other channels in any order.

3) Changes to any of the products already on Amazon can now be made in any order. for example, you can run a price feed before submitting a product, if all you do is change the description data, etc.

4) When you need to add a new product, make sure that you launch the product feed first, then other channels.

If possible, I would create a separate process for adding new products. In addition, I think this will help you if you only upload changes to products each time, and not the entire catalog. There’s a bit more work for you to determine what has changed, but this will speed up the submission process and mean that you do not always expect the feed to complete.

Answer 2

Yes, the product feed is the first primary feed. You need to wait until the product feed is completed before sending other channels.

When you submit a product feed, its status becomes as follows: 1) _IN_PROGRESS_ 2) REPRESENTED 3) DONE 4) COMPLETED You need to wait until the status changes to "DONE" or "COMPLETED".

Thanks.