I am sure these thoughts go through the minds of many experienced sellers who have reached a certain level and now feel like it is time to automate. Below are some things you need to consider before starting from scratch. This article is not intended to provide a step-by-step guide for tech-savvy professionals. It is more for folks who need a business understanding of the process.

Spoiler: Unless you are ready to spend up to $10K to get basic functionality, it might not be worth it... Here's why...

Do you have Developer permission? Did you get your application approved?

Even before we get to the fun stuff, you need to have a professional seller account with developer profile. Then, before you can do anything, you need to set up an application and ask for permission to connect to the Amazon SP API. In this case, the application is your future code that you would use to connect. Yes, you need to get approval for an application that you have not created yet. This might be troublesome and might take time.

 Do you have a budget to invest in building infrastructure?

You can't just create a piece of code interacting with API and run it. It is more complicated than that. You need to connect via Amazon AWS to get to Amazon SP API, with complicated connection roles and constantly changing keys and connection passwords.

You need to set up a server, create the database and develop application logic. However, all those described in this section require a different skill set – finding one person to do all of it is almost impossible.

Thus said, if you do everything from scratch, be prepared to spend $2K to $3K just on setup and development costs to create the basic infrastructure to start pulling data. This is if you hire a reasonably priced freelance developer who would deliver on time and within budget.

Do you understand Amazon table structures or data movements?

Let's say you had a good Dev guy who jumped through all obstacles and created what is needed, and you are ready to start pulling data... Oops... there are so many confusing tables, rules, and limitations that you would need to spend weeks and months with your developer to learn all that. There is some documentation, but it is not that easy to digest. So, you would need to allocate another 100-300 hours at least as a learning curve for your developer and yourself. That's another $1K-$5K depending on how deep you get under the hood.

Did you allocate money to maintain a programmer to perform maintenance?

We are not underestimating the complexity of Amazon databases and transaction movements. We can't even imagine how they handle trillions of info-transactions per day – it deserves our respect. However, due to complexity, Amazon at times sends incomplete, incorrect data, or the response time chokes up your application. In addition, every so often, Amazon SP API makes changes in tables or requests, and you need to adjust your code monthly and set up data quality controls. Thus, you need someone to monitor and assist you when needed. Most developers don't want to be part-time ‘on-call’ basis, so either you keep your Dev guy/girl on a full-time basis or offer a high hourly rate, which either way is expensive.

What options do you have if spending $10-20K just to get basic functionality seems like overkill?

If you still feel like the pain of downloading .csv or txt files and creating workbooks in Google Sheets or Excel is a major issue, or if running those off-the-shelf tools takes too much time and some automation would be cost-effective, then perhaps you can contact companies that already have connections and infrastructure, and the only costs you would incur are just some customizations, which might be only 5%-10% of what you would have spent if you wanted to get everything from scratch. Obviously, you can contact us at support@stripetail.com.

Our team consists of business folks and good Amazon SP-API developers. We have provided solutions for smaller Amazon sellers and large well-known corporate clients. Additionally, on our team, we have ex-seven-digit sellers who inspired the creation of some of our off-the-shelf solutions, and they understand Amazon nuances, potential issues, and can advise on optimizations.

We can export any information from Amazon SP-API in your preferred format – API endpoint, excel report to your email, spreadsheet in Google Docs, CSV to FTP, etc. Our team will take care of any technical details, combining information from any needed 3-rd party sources -, etc. Integration with any CRM/accounting systems with API documentation. Since we are a boutique company, we guarantee that all your requests will be handled by actual developers and Amazon experts – no level 1, 2, 3 supports back and forth 😊.