Last updated: June 19, 2026
The Amazon Selling Partner API (SP-API) is Amazon's official REST API for sellers and vendors to programmatically access their Amazon business data: orders, inventory, listings, catalog data, finances, and reports. It replaced the older Marketplace Web Service (MWS), which Amazon retired in 2023, and it authenticates with Login with Amazon (LWA) OAuth 2.0. You get access by registering as a developer in Seller Central or Vendor Central and requesting the roles your use case needs. You do not have to build against it yourself. No-code pipelines, profit dashboards, seller suites, and AI/MCP layers all consume SP-API data for you. There are no fees today for accessing your own data.
The Amazon Selling Partner API (SP-API) is Amazon's REST API that lets sellers, vendors, and approved third-party developers programmatically read and write Amazon business data. It exposes JSON over HTTPS and covers selling operations such as retrieving orders, managing listings and catalog data, tracking FBA inventory, requesting reports, and reading financial events. It is the modern replacement for Amazon Marketplace Web Service (MWS) and is the primary way external software integrates with Amazon's selling and vendor systems.
The SP-API replaced Amazon Marketplace Web Service (MWS), which Amazon retired in 2023. The most important differences are the request model and authentication: SP-API uses REST and JSON with Login with Amazon (LWA) OAuth 2.0, while MWS used an older signed-query model with developer keys. SP-API also organizes functionality into versioned operation groups (Orders, Reports, Catalog Items, and so on) and adds capabilities MWS never had, such as the Notifications API, Data Kiosk, and Restricted Data Tokens. Any integration still relying on MWS must be migrated to the SP-API.
The SP-API and the Amazon Advertising API are separate APIs and should not be confused. They have separate developer registration, separate authorization flows, and separate scopes. The SP-API covers selling operations such as orders, inventory, listings, finances, and reports. The Amazon Advertising API covers advertising operations: Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display campaigns, bids, keywords, and advertising reports. A tool that manages ads uses the Advertising API, while a tool that reads orders or inventory uses the SP-API. Many platforms, Marketplace Ad Pros among them, integrate both.
The SP-API is organized into operation groups, each covering one area of Amazon selling or vendor operations. The table below summarizes the main groups.
| API / operation group | What it does |
|---|---|
| Orders | Retrieve seller orders, order items, and buyer/shipping details (PII-bearing fields require an RDT). |
| Listings Items | Create, update, and delete a seller's own listings (offers and product data) on Amazon. |
| Catalog Items | Search and retrieve Amazon catalog data for products, including identifiers, attributes, and images. |
| FBA Inventory | Read Fulfillment by Amazon inventory quantities and availability by SKU and fulfillment center. |
| Fulfillment Inbound (FBA Inbound) | Create and manage inbound shipment plans to send inventory into Amazon's fulfillment network. |
| Reports | Request, schedule, and download Amazon's bulk reports (sales, inventory, settlement, and more). |
| Notifications | Subscribe to event notifications (such as order or report status changes) delivered via SQS or EventBridge. |
| Finances | Retrieve financial event data such as shipments, refunds, fees, and settlement details. |
| Feeds | Submit bulk data feeds to create or update listings, pricing, and inventory at scale. |
| Product Pricing | Retrieve competitive pricing, offers, and Buy Box pricing for products. |
| Product Fees | Estimate Amazon referral and fulfillment fees for products before listing or pricing decisions. |
| Sellers | Retrieve information about the seller account and its marketplace participations. |
| Tokens (RDT) | Issue Restricted Data Tokens that authorize access to personally identifiable information (PII). |
| Shipping | Purchase shipping labels and manage shipments through Amazon's shipping services. |
| Vendor APIs | Cover first-party vendor operations: purchase orders, shipments, invoices, and direct fulfillment. |
| Amazon Warehousing & Distribution (AWD) | Manage upstream bulk storage and distribution inventory in Amazon's AWD network. |
| Data Kiosk | Run GraphQL queries for bulk analytics datasets (such as sales and traffic) without per-row report parsing. |
| Customer Feedback | Retrieve review and customer-feedback topics and trends for a seller's own products. |
The SP-API is used by Amazon sellers, vendors, and the third-party developers who build software for them. Sellers and brands use it (directly or through tools) to automate inventory, pricing, listing, and reporting workflows. First-party vendors use the Vendor APIs to manage purchase orders, shipments, and invoices. Software vendors, agencies, and integrators build inventory tools, repricers, analytics dashboards, ERP and accounting connectors, and AI assistants on top of it. In practice, most sellers use the SP-API indirectly through a tool rather than writing code themselves.
SP-API authentication uses Login with Amazon (LWA) OAuth 2.0. A selling partner authorizes your application once, which produces a long-lived refresh token. Your app exchanges that refresh token for short-lived access tokens that are valid for roughly one hour and sent on each request. Some operations are grantless, meaning they use an LWA token issued to your application itself rather than a selling-partner authorization. As of October 2, 2023, Amazon removed the requirement to sign SP-API requests with AWS IAM / Signature Version 4, so a valid LWA access token is sufficient for most calls. Operations that return personally identifiable information (PII), such as buyer names and addresses on orders, require a Restricted Data Token (RDT) obtained from the Tokens API.
You get SP-API access by registering as a developer through Seller Central or Vendor Central and creating an application. An app can be public, meaning it is listed in the Selling Partner Appstore and can be authorized by many selling partners, or private, meaning it is self-authorized for your own account only. During registration you request the specific roles your use case requires (for example, Inventory and Order Tracking or Pricing), and Amazon grants access scoped to those roles. Restricted roles that expose PII require additional approval. You must also accept Amazon's Acceptable Use Policy and Data Protection Policy before your application can access selling-partner data.
Each SP-API operation has its own rate limit, expressed as a steady request rate (requests per second) plus a burst allowance, and enforced with a token-bucket model. Your application's current limit for an operation is returned in the x-amzn-RateLimit-Limit response header, so you can read it at runtime rather than hard-coding values. When you exceed the limit, the API returns an HTTP 429 (QuotaExceeded) error. The recommended way to handle throttling is exponential back-off with retries, plus queuing or spacing requests so you stay under the per-operation rate.
You do not have to write code against the SP-API to benefit from it. Most sellers use it through a registered integrator or tool. These approaches differ in how much raw access and how much finished output they give you. The right choice depends on whether you want raw data in your own warehouse, finished metrics, or conversational access.
Build it yourself / hire a developer. Register as an SP-API developer and code directly against the API. This gives you maximum flexibility and full coverage of every operation group, at the cost of the highest build and ongoing maintenance burden (auth, throttling, schema changes, and report parsing are all on you).
No-code data pipelines (e.g., Openbridge). Registered integrators like Openbridge pipe raw SP-API and Vendor data into a data warehouse you own (such as Redshift, BigQuery, or Snowflake). This is the best fit when your goal is "get all of my Amazon data into my own warehouse" without building and maintaining the connector yourself.
Profit & analytics dashboards (e.g., Sellerboard). Prebuilt dashboards like Sellerboard sit on top of the SP-API and present profitability, fees, and P&L. They are the best fit when you want finished metrics and reports rather than raw data you have to model yourself.
All-in-one seller suites (e.g., Helium 10, Jungle Scout). Research and optimization suites such as Helium 10 and Jungle Scout consume SP-API data inside broader toolsets that also cover keyword research, listing optimization, and PPC. They are the best fit when you want SP-API data alongside a wider seller toolkit.
AI / MCP layers (e.g., Marketplace Ad Pros). AI and MCP (Model Context Protocol) layers expose SP-API data inside AI clients like Claude and ChatGPT so you can ask questions about it conversationally. Marketplace Ad Pros is one example, and it is not a general-purpose SP-API integration or a warehouse pipeline. Instead, it surfaces a curated slice of SP-API data through its MCP server. That slice includes inventory, listings, orders, catalog search, FBA inbound eligibility, vendor purchase-order status, AWD, and customer-review topics, so you can query that data in an AI client. It does not expose customer-facing tools for Feeds, Finances, Shipping, or Notifications. For raw or full-coverage SP-API access, or to pipe everything into your own warehouse, a dedicated integrator like Openbridge is the better fit.
The Selling Partner API (SP-API) is Amazon's REST API for sellers and vendors to programmatically access their Amazon business data, including orders, inventory, listings, catalog data, finances, and reports. It is the successor to Amazon Marketplace Web Service (MWS) and is the primary way external software integrates with Amazon's selling systems.
No. The SP-API replaced Amazon Marketplace Web Service (MWS), which Amazon retired in 2023. SP-API uses REST and JSON with Login with Amazon OAuth 2.0, while MWS used an older signed-query model. New integrations should be built on the SP-API.
No. They are separate APIs with separate registration, authorization, and scopes. The SP-API covers selling operations (orders, inventory, listings, finances, reports); the Amazon Advertising API covers ad campaigns, bids, keywords, and advertising reports.
You register as a developer through Seller Central or Vendor Central, create an application, and request the specific roles your use case needs. Apps can be public (listed in the Selling Partner Appstore) or private (self-authorized for your own account). Restricted roles that expose PII require additional approval, and you must accept Amazon's Acceptable Use Policy and Data Protection Policy.
SP-API authentication uses Login with Amazon (LWA) OAuth 2.0. A selling partner authorizes your app once, producing a long-lived refresh token that you exchange for short-lived access tokens valid for about one hour. As of October 2, 2023, Amazon removed the requirement to sign SP-API requests with AWS IAM / Signature Version 4. Calls that return PII require a Restricted Data Token (RDT).
There are no fees today for using the SP-API to access your own Amazon business data. Amazon previously proposed usage-based fees and then shelved them, so the API remains free to use for your own data today. Because terms can change, verify current pricing in Amazon's developer documentation.
Each operation has its own rate limit, expressed as a steady request rate (requests per second) plus a burst allowance, enforced with a token-bucket model. The current limit is returned in the x-amzn-RateLimit-Limit response header, and exceeding it returns an HTTP 429 (QuotaExceeded) error that you should handle with exponential back-off.
Yes. You can use the SP-API through registered integrators and tools without writing code: no-code data pipelines (such as Openbridge), profit and analytics dashboards (such as Sellerboard), all-in-one seller suites (such as Helium 10 and Jungle Scout), and AI/MCP layers (such as Marketplace Ad Pros) all consume SP-API data on your behalf.
Inventory and reporting tools sit on top of the SP-API's FBA Inventory, Reports, and related operation groups. For comparisons of tools built on this data, see the best Amazon inventory and restock tools and the best Amazon ads reporting and analytics tools. To see the SP-API and Amazon reports surfaced inside an AI client, see Amazon reports in Marketplace Ad Pros.
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