I've been experimenting heavily with the different MWS API's. I'm trying to retrieve the following info about my items:
1 - Number of offers - Available via GetLowestPricedOffersForSKU
2 - Number of FBA offers - Available via GetLowestPricedOffersForSKU
3 - Sales Rank of product - ?
4 - Competitive Price (buy box) - Available via GetCompetitivePricingForSKU
5 - Names of other merchants offering product - ?
6 - Price of offers - Available via GetLowestPricedOffersForSKU
The two elements I cannot find are Sales rank and names of other merchants
These both seem to be available via the Product Advertising API but not the MWS Product API as per this example here.
It was my (perhaps incorrect) understanding that the Product MWS API was mostly the same thing as the Product Advertising API except that the former is designed for sellers and the latter for others to sell on their own sites.
Am I missing something here?
Your understanding is correct. The MWS API lets you work with your own data - it basically is an alternative to Seller Central. The Product Advertising API lets you access public data - it is an alternative to browsing the www.amazon.com website. To get sales rank information and a list of offers from different merchants, check the various ResponseGroups for the ItemLookup call.
The MWS Product API, specifically getMatchingProductForId, will give you sales rank, on some skus that are children of parents, you have to getMatchingProductForId on the parent in order to get the sales rank of the parent as the child might not have it. additionally, it gives it to you on a per-category basis.
Check out the AnyOfferChangedNotification. If you subscribe to those push notifications (it uses Amazon SQS), you'll get price change notifications on any product you sell if any of the top 20 change in price. The data you are returned will show you the other merchant id's as well as their rank and loads of other information like buy box owner, landed price, shipping price, feedback rating and count.. etc. etc.
We use these notifications to re-price our products in near real time based on how the competition moves.
