Is there a amazon webstore API for customers?

Question

I am working on a personal expense tracking application and would like to retrieve a list of orders made by a customer (me) on amazon.com.

The Amazon MWS API is described as follows:

Amazon Marketplace Web Service (MWS) is an integrated web service API that allows Amazon sellers to programmatically exchange data on orders, payments, reports, and more.

That is clearly meant for use by sellers, not by customers. Is there any way I could retrieve that information, without having to rely on browser automation?

Answer 1

You will probably have to build a crawler to log into your account, browse your order history and parse the pages.

As far as finding official word on the availability of such a feature, nothing suggests there is such a thing as a customer API and rarely do people offer a list of services they don't provide. Amazon might simply consider this being too much of a fringe case to bother having one.

While it happens that certain features are simply under-documented, more often than not the absence of documentation is simply the reflection of the absence of the feature itself. And it's notoriously difficult to prove a negative. Therefore we can only reach for the most obvious answer, that there is no such thing.

A crawler is certainly less efficient than a dedicated API and prone to break on page design changes, but it is still better than nothing.