Amazon API: Maximizing Its Value with Automated Data Integration

Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies are continually looking for innovative methods to increase supply chain and operational efficiency, monitor and improve product and promotion performance, and make informed business decisions that drive increased sales, revenue, and profitability.

One of the most powerful tools available to both established CPG companies and emerging brands is Amazon’s API, which facilitates comprehensive data access from platforms like Amazon Seller Central, Amazon Vendor Central, and Amazon Retail Analytics. Acquiring and leveraging this retail data requires sophisticated automation to fully harness Amazon's valuable insights into sales, inventory, traffic, and profitability.

With Retail Velocity’s fully automated data import process through our VELOCITY^® retail data platform, we ensure that daily item, store, and e-commerce data updates flow seamlessly into our cloud-based platform, while also enabling one common and configurable interface across all the various retailers' data sets. This one version of the truth empowers brands to act on actionable insights without consuming time on manual data management.

In this blog post, we dive into Amazon’s API benefits and the unique value of Retail Velocity’s tailored retail data extraction and integration solution.

Understanding Amazon’s API and Portal Ecosystem

Amazon’s data ecosystem is vast, with dedicated portals designed for different types of Amazon partners:

• Amazon Seller Central: Primarily used by third-party sellers, Seller Central provides tools to monitor product listings, orders, inventory, and other seller-related activities.

• Amazon Vendor Central: Designed for first-party sellers or vendors, Vendor Central enables brands selling directly to Amazon to access orders, forecast demand, manage inventory, and monitor performance.

• Amazon Retail Analytics (ARA): This tool is available in Basic and Premium versions and provides vendors with deep insights into sales metrics, market trends, and inventory data. ARA Premium enhances the depth of insights, making it a powerful tool for brands focused on optimizing their Amazon presence.

Access to Amazon’s API empowers CPG companies to extract essential data points across these platforms, building a robust data-driven foundation for strategic business decisions. Through seamless integration into VELOCITY, our system eliminates the need for human intervention, offering a continuous and reliable data feed.

Key Data Types Critical to CPG Success

The value of Amazon’s data lies in its ability to inform strategic decisions, address operational bottlenecks, and optimize resources. Here are the critical data types available through Amazon’s API:

Sales Sourcing

This view captures sales data for Amazon Standard Identification Numbers (ASINs) specifically sourced from a given vendor. For example, if Amazon orders a product directly from Vendor A, that product’s sales will be reflected in Vendor A’s Sourcing view, while products acquired from other sources are excluded. This allows vendors to view their direct sales performance for items that Amazon has specifically purchased from them. This aids in vendor-specific performance analysis and supply chain planning, providing particular metrics for Amazon's return on investment to support better decision-making.

Sales Manufacturing

The Manufacturing view aggregates data across all Amazon ASINs associated with a brand, regardless of the sourcing origin. This view allows manufacturers to get a comprehensive look at total brand sales, tracking the combined sales across all sources. This data is essential for assessing overall brand performance on Amazon, allowing brands to monitor their sales activity holistically and gain insights into inventory needs and market reach.

Inventory

Real-time access to Amazon inventory data allows brands to manage stock efficiently, reducing costs associated with holding excess inventory and optimizing replenishment cycles based on demand.

Amazon Traffic

Traffic data reflects shopper behavior, highlighting patterns, product visibility, and conversion rates. Insights from traffic data enable CPGs to refine their marketing strategies and product placement.

Pure Profit Margin (PPM)

Amazon PPM data measures profitability at a granular level, helping brands evaluate their margins across product categories and optimize pricing strategies.

Each data type plays a pivotal role in refining supply chain management, boosting product visibility, and increasing sales and profitability. With VELOCITY, our automated data integration ensures that this valuable data is available daily, without manual intervention, giving clients an edge in adapting to rapidly changing markets and addressing sales trends.

The Importance of Amazon’s API for CPG Companies

For CPGs, staying competitive on Amazon requires more than just selling products. Success involves maximizing product and brand visibility, significantly reducing out-of-stocks, maintaining optimized inventory levels, and responding quickly to market changes or shifts in consumer demand. With data accessed through Amazon’s API, brands can:

• Optimize Inventory Levels: Predictive analytics, based on real-time data, helps avoid stockouts and overstocking, critical for meeting demand without incurring additional storage costs.
  
  
• Enhance Marketing Effectiveness: By understanding traffic patterns and consumer behavior, brands can tailor their marketing strategies to attract more customers, ensure on-shelf availability, and drive higher conversion rates.
  
  
• Improve Profitability and Pricing: Monitoring PPM data allows brands to identify profitable products and optimize pricing strategies accordingly.
  Access to these insights directly impacts how effectively CPG companies can respond to demand, manage supply chains, and ultimately enhance their profitability.

A Solution Built to Address Core Challenges

Retail Velocity has developed a comprehensive automated integration with Amazon’s API to eliminate the operational hurdles often associated with retail data management. Traditional data extraction processes can be labor-intensive, prone to errors, and slow to deliver actionable insights. In contrast, VELOCITY enables clients to:

• Save Time and Resources: By automating data imports, VELOCITY eliminates the need for manual data entry or validation, freeing up valuable employee time for strategic analysis.
  
  
• Reduce Errors and Improve Data Accuracy: Automation minimizes human error, ensuring that decisions are based on precise data.
  
  
• Receive Daily Updates: With daily data imports, clients can act on the latest, most reliable data to respond quickly to trends, adjust production, or modify pricing strategies in real time.

This approach transforms raw data into timely, actionable insights without draining IT or financial resources, allowing valuable personnel to focus on strategic, higher-value growth initiatives rather than operational tasks.

Additionally, Amazon is likely only one of your retailer partners. With VELOCITY, users will have access to ALL your retailers’ sales and inventory data for ALL your products, providing a comprehensive, horizontal view across your partners. This capability maximizes the value of your data and significantly reduces manual efforts.

Unique Features of VELOCITY’S Integration with Amazon’s API

Our robust solution isn’t just about data access—it’s about improving the quality and usability of your data:

Customizable, Interactive Dashboards

Our VELOCITY retail data platform offers a user-friendly interface that minimizes training requirements. With it, you can configure dashboards, set alerts, and generate customized reports to suit your specific needs. These configurable dashboards allow VELOCITY users to have one common view for all retailers, and this can all be done without requiring Microsoft PowerBI licenses.

Advanced Analytics That Drive Insights

By integrating with Amazon’s API, VELOCITY enhances data with additional insights, applying analytics that help clients identify sales and market trends and growth opportunities, making the data more than just raw figures.

Seamless System Integration

For clients using ERP systems, our integration facilitates a seamless data flow between Amazon’s ecosystem and their internal tools. This ensures that they can leverage insights across departments without disruption, ultimately enhancing collaboration.

Scalability and Flexibility

VELOCITY is designed to accommodate clients’ evolving business and technology needs, with scalability that allows them to add retail data sources or adjust metrics as their businesses grow.

Kit Breakage and Rollups

VELOCITY’s ability to use a “least common denominator” model helps brands realize multiple benefits, including kit breakdowns for proper comparisons of your item-level SKUs.

Through these unique capabilities, Retail Velocity offers a complete solution that’s not only efficient but also adaptable, providing clients with the reliable data foundation they need to drive success with Amazon.

Expanding Global Reach: Countries Available with VELOCITY’s Amazon API Integration

VELOCITY’s Amazon API integration is designed to support the global ambitions of CPG brands by providing access to a wide range of countries. Currently, Retail Velocity has 26 retail data adaptors fully operational for 21 countries, with seamless data flows into VELOCITY. This breadth of international coverage enables clients to manage their Amazon presence across diverse markets with consistency and ease.

Active Countries:

• United States
• Australia
• Belgium
• Brazil
• Canada
• France
• Germany
• Italy
• Japan
• Mexico
• Netherlands
• Poland
• South Africa
• Spain
• Sweden
• Turkey
• United Kingdom

Countries Set Up and Pending Data Availability:

• India
• Saudi Arabia
• Singapore
• United Arab Emirates

Conclusion: Enabling Data-Driven Decisions with VELOCITY and Amazon’s API

Amazon’s API offers unprecedented access to valuable sales, inventory, traffic, and profitability data, all of which are essential to a CPG company’s success on the platform. With automated data integration between Amazon and VELOCITY, we simplify this complexity, providing daily data updates and actionable insights without requiring manual intervention.

For CPG companies aiming to thrive in a competitive retail landscape, timely and accurate data is non-negotiable. By transforming Amazon’s API data into a strategic asset, Retail Velocity empowers brands of all sizes to make better and more efficient business decisions, optimize operations, and maximize profitability. As a reliable partner in this journey to profitable growth, Retail Velocity is committed to helping our clients unlock the full potential of Amazon’s ecosystem, giving them the tools and insights they need to stay ahead of the competition and be successful.

Contact us today to learn more about how Retail Velocity can help you maximize the value of your Amazon data—and the data from ALL your retail partners.