API Rates

Curious to know how we provision API call rates for Product Advertising API 5.0? First, some definitions

• TPS – Transactions per second, refers to the maximum number of API calls you can make in one second. Each API call counts as one transaction. For example, if you send 10 ASINs in the request parameter of a GetItems() call, it counts as a single transaction.
• TPD – Transactions per day, refers to the maximum number of API calls you can make in one day. If Associate has 1 TPS and 8640 TPD, then maximum of 1 request can be sent per second and 8640 per day. Even if 1 TPS is there, once TPD is exhausted requests will be throttled.
• Primary Account – This refers to the Amazon username (email address) and password that you used to create your Associates account and used to generate Product Advertising API 5.0 credentials.
• Shipped revenue – This refers to the total sales volume of all items Amazon has shipped from orders resulting from clicks through links you created using Product Advertising API 5.0.

As soon as you create your Product Advertising API 5.0 credentials, you are allowed an initial usage limit up to a maximum of one request per second (one TPS) and a cumulative daily maximum of 8640 requests per day (8640 TPD) for the first 30-day period. This will help you begin your integration with the API, test it out, and start building links and referring products to your readers.

Your PA API usage limit will be adjusted based on your shipped item revenue. Your account will earn a usage limit of one TPD for every five cents or one TPS (up to a maximum of ten TPS) for every $4320 of shipped item revenue generated via the use of Product Advertising API 5.0 for shipments in the previous 30-day period. For correct attribution of shipped item revenue please ensure that you always call Product Advertising API 5.0 with the primary account credentials and retain all the URL parameters that the API returns in its response.

Note that your account will lose access to Product Advertising API 5.0 if it has not generated referring sales for a consecutive 30-day period. If you lose access to Product Advertising API 5.0, you can continue to use other product linking tools, such as Site Stripe and generate revenue. You will regain access to Product Advertising API 5.0 within two days after your referred sales are shipped.

You can check to see sales that have been attributed to Product Advertising API 5.0 by navigating to the Link Type Performance report on Associates Central.

It is important you adopt the following best practices to ensure that your referred sales are correctly being attributed to the account used in your Product Advertising API 5.0 integration.

• You are using the links provided by Product Advertising API 5.0 when linking back to Amazon. Do not edit any of the URL parameters.
• Your Associate account and Product Advertising API account were created using the same Amazon account (i.e. email address).
• You are using your primary account to make requests to Product Advertising API 5.0.
• You are passing your Partner tag in all your requests to Product Advertising API 5.0. We cannot retroactively apply any sales credit to your account if you forget to do this correctly.

Are you doing all of the above and still observing API throttling? If you are trying to submit requests that exceed your account’s usage limit, or if your access has been revoked you will receive a 429 TooManyRequests error message from Product Advertising API 5.0. Please refer our API integration best practices to learn more on how to avoid these situations and optimally access the API.