Setting up an Amazon API

Step 1: Generate your Amazon API Key

Channable connects to your Amazon Europe Unified (DE, FR, UK, ES, IT, NL, and SE) or Amazon North America Unified (US, CA, and MX) account. So you don't need to log in to a specific country (yet).

Go to the following Amazon login page. Once you have logged into your account, click "Settings > Account Info > Your merchant token". 

Authorize a new developer

In "Settings > User permissions >Third-party developer and apps", you can manage your apps. There, you can authorize Channable as a developer by clicking on "Authorize a new developer".


You will be redirected to a new screen where you can fill in the Channable developer information based on the Amazon account you wish to connect with:

After filling in the developer information, you can click on the "Next" button and you will see a preview of the identification numbers.

Write down your seller ID and the MWS authentication token, you will need them later.

Step 2: Create a new Amazon connection in Channable

Go to "[your company name in the top right corner] > Connections" and click on "+ Add a new connection > Amazon".

You can now fill in a name for the connection under "Label"; the seller ID (your merchant token) of your Amazon Seller account and a region (Europe or North America). 

Click on "Create" which will redirect your Amazon Seller Central account (if you are logged out, you will need to fill in your login credentials) and confirm the authorizations. You will then be redirected to your Channable account in which you can click "+Add a new connection".

Step 3: Create a new Amazon API

To create a new API, go to your project and "APIs > + Add new API" and select the Amazon connection you have previously created. 

You will be redirected to the API settings, where you can choose the country where you want to send your products and select the unique ID per item. Then, click on "Continue" to create the new Amazon API.

Step 4: Create your product listing in Channable

Creating your product listings is very quick and easy. You can create your product listings by following the four steps below in the Amazon API.

1. Categories
   For your product data to be created your products need a category. Add categories to your products by using the generate categories feature or create new categories from scratch. You can also make use of our Smart Categorization which automatically matches your items to the most likely product category of Amazon. 
   
   
2. Rules
   Create different rules to optimize your product data. Take a look at our common rules support article for some examples.
   
   
3. Build
   Here you can find our preset template for the product listings. You can fill in this template by clicking on each field and selecting what information you want to send to Amazon. For example, the project field Title should display the title of your product, etc. After completing the template, do not forget to click on "Save" at the bottom of the page.
   
   
   Tip! Notice the question mark behind every field. If you hover over the question mark you will see the description of the field and suggestions for possible values.
4. Attributes
   You are almost done! Now, you need to fill in the "Attributes". Select the category you want to optimize first. An example of what should be in front of you now can be seen in the screenshot below. A more detailed explanation of what to do in the "Attributes" step can be found in our Attributes support article.
   
   Important: A few attributes are mandatory by default as per Amazon documentation. This may mean that you see a mandatory field in the attribute builder that does not make sense for that category. You can leave these attributes empty when you first set up the API. 
   For example: If you sell products in the category shoes, the attributes "item_volume_unit_of_measure" and "Categorization/GHS pictograms" do not apply. They can stay empty when sending your products for the first time. If Amazon does need some of these attributes to be filled in, the API will return an error (see step 7). 

Step 5: Remove old product listings from your Amazon account 

In order to avoid synchronization errors, it is important that your old product listings do not remain in your Amazon account when you enable the Amazon API in Channable. To remove old product listings, go to "Your Amazon account > Inventory > Inventory Management". Select all listings and delete them by clicking "Action on Selected X > Delete Products and Offers". Repeat this action until your inventory is empty.

If you wish to use our Amazon API to update existing product listings in your Amazon Seller account that were not pushed by our API, you can use the Amazon Partial Update feature. In this case, you don't need to remove the listings from your Amazon account, but the Unique ID per item of the API needs to match with the Amazon SKUs of your products. 

Step 6: Send your products to Amazon

In the last tab "Result", there is an overview of which products will be sent to Amazon under "Preview products". Once the set-up is done, go back to the "Settings" of your Amazon API in order to activate it. Then, click on "Run" to send your products to Amazon. 

Step 7: Solve errors in the API 

After sending your product listings to Amazon, you can see in "Result > Errors" which listings contain errors and are thus not online yet. Clicking on an error code enables you to have a description of this error and possibly what is causing it. Visit our guide on how to solve common errors for Amazon.