Fresh Store Builder is now up to date with the latest Amazon API changes. What does this mean and how does this effect your stores? Read on to find out about the limits imposed on searches for products, change to offers, additional requirements and more.
What is an Amazon API Change?
The Amazon API is what we use to get the product information from Amazon to populate your FSB stores. Occasionally improvements are made, additional information is made available, some information is made unavailable and in doing so we need to update the FSB software to handle this.
What changed in the latest update?
In the latest update (detailed here on Amazon) there were a few mainly minor changes:
Associate Tag Parameter: Your Amazon Associate tag needs now to be passed with every request to the API. This was already done in FSB and needed no changes.
Seller Operations: Amazon no longer provides access to further details on the sellers of products on Amazon. This was not used in FSB anyway.
ItemPage Parameter: When retrieving products from Amazon, they used to allow a maximum of 4000 products per “search”. This is now reduced to 100. A “search” is defined as when you request products either by a search term or a browsenode. This is where Fresh Store Builder has an advantage over competitors – we store results locally so there is no limit on the products you can add to a category. Other Amazon Scripts link a category directly to a “search” which means they now have a theoretical maximum of 100 products per category (likely less, after filtering).
Merchants search index: It is no longer possible to build a search based on a Merchant. A merchant is a seller on Amazon and was very unlikely to be used on FSB.
ItemAttributes Response group: Irrelevant Item Attributes (i.e. meta information about a product) are no longer made available. This is a good thing as there was a lot of strange and irrelevant information that needed filtering out here. Hopefully this won’t start filtering out useful attributes. There is a lot of control over attributes in Fresh Store Builder, including the ability to add your own.
Offers: The Amazon API used to return all the offers on a product. For popular products this was a challenge as some sellers would put low prices and high postage. Now the Amazon API returns the best offer for the give criteria which should increase conversions, as our customers will get the best deal when they add to basket.
How do I ensure my store is using these latest changes?
Simply login to your Fresh Store Builder account and download the latest version here: www.freshstorebuilder.com/download/
Don’t forget if you need any help upgrading we have our expert Extras team on hand and if you are not already using the worlds most advanced affiliate script join today!
