Requirements for accessing SP-API
I’m a software developer, and I have a potential client who is a Amazon seller, to integrate their office systems with Amazon sales data via SP-API.
The Amazon website is very unclear as to what I type of account I personally need to do be able to do this. Do I need to set myself up as a seller (even though I won’t be selling anything through Amazon myself)? Should my client me adding me as a user? Do I just ask them to generate whatever auth codes are needed (I haven’t looked at the API itself yet) and never need to log in to Amazon myself?
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This depends on whether you want to make software that is specific to that seller and not transferable, or if you want to publish it for other sellers to be able to use.
You can EITHER authorise each API call using your developer key plus the seller’s token, OR you can authorise it using the seller’s developer key (not sure if you also need a token for this).
Developer keys expire if not used for a long period (used to be 6 months but I believe it’s now 3?), reactivating them requires you to re-do the application process.
In order to apply for a developer key, you need to be a seller on a professional plan (£25 per month).
The application process can take several months, especially for development related to orders, as customer data is involved you have to show that you understand how to properly secure/encrypt the data.
The seller also need to be on a professional plan in order to obtain a token, there is no waiting period when obtaining one. The token expires every 12 months, if you renew it before it expires it won’t change, if it expires before you renew it a new one will be generated, so you’ll need to make sure it can be swapped and don’t hard-code it in.
As an aside, Amazon DO NOT have any sort of sandbox or test environment, so you will need to test your code using live data, which is not an ideal situation.
