Product Advertising Api Terminology And Basic Concepts; The Marketplace - Amazon Product Advertising API Developer's Manual

Product Advertising API Terminology and Basic
Concepts
Topics
• The Marketplace (p. 22)
• What Is the Product Advertising API? (p. 23)
• How Do I Make Money Using the Product Advertising API? (p. 23)
• International Locales (p. 23)
• Items for Sale (p. 24)
• Summary of Product Advertising API Operations (p. 26)
• Product Advertising API Developer Community (p. 28)
This chapter introduces you to Product Advertising API terminology and concepts. Many of the concepts
introduced in this chapter are explored in greater depth in later chapters.The concepts are briefly presented
here so that you have a broad understanding of Product Advertising API and have a context in which you
can place the specifics that are presented in later chapters.

The Marketplace

Amazon started in a two-bedroom house in Seattle. The location was chosen because of its proximity to
Ingram, a book wholesaler and because of the wealth of talented programmers in the area. In the garage
of that house, Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, stockpiled books and set up three Sun Microsystems
computers to take book orders online. In 1995, Jeff opened his online bookstore to the public. At that
time, there was only one kind of seller, in fact, there was only one seller, Jeff . He only sold one type of
product: books. Soon after the start of Amazon, the garage became too small to run the business.
Since 1995, the number of sellers has grown, the types of sellers have grown, and the product offerings
have grown. All of these sellers come together to sell their items on www.amazon.com, in what is called
the "marketplace."
Individual sellers cannot have their own storefront in the marketplace. Pro Merchant Sellers and Merchant@
vendors can. Individual sellers can, however, set up their own storefronts outside of the marketplace.
These storefronts can be accessed through www.amazon.com. Amazon refers to these stores as zShops.
Product Advertising API requests cannot access zShops.This usually has little impact on product searches
because zShop owners can also list their items for sale in the Amazon marketplace.
Product Advertising API Developer Guide
Product Advertising API Terminology and Basic
Concepts
API Version 2011-08-01
22