I have a hard time imagining what kind of "side project" would be making use of the Amazon Selling Partner API. It all revolves around managing listings and sales through the Amazon storefront - if you've got a use case for that, it's probably for something serious.
These players will try to bypass the API limitations by scraping the customer website if they have to, but Amazon may engage in a cat n mouse game with them rather than just throttling abusively stupid clients.
I'm not sure what kind of data is vended through this API, but it seems like if this is data on products that amazon.com sells, won't people simply resort to scraping using residential proxies, mobile networks, etc. which are harder to mitigate?
It’s interesting that only GET calls are metered. Is this a common thing to do?
I wonder if this is also being done to limit marketplace data being scraped with the API or limit how this data gets used by limiting low margin business models. Increasing the fees will have these effects.
I've been noticing this happen more lately. Intuit QuickBooks did this exact same thing for GET calls this year as well.
My theory is they see POST/PUT calls as adding value and are actions that customer need to perform and help the platform (adding products, inventory, etc). But GET calls they see as leaching off them and not core requirements.
The huge gap in this theory are things like Seller Fulfilled orders which you have to GET, but for Amazon they have always pushed hard for Amazon Fulfilled instead.
In the end I think this is all mostly to keep things/control in-house as much as possible. Some apps will shut down, others will pass the cost along the sellers. Sellers always lose.
The focus on charging for GETs is unfortunate given that in my (very outdated) experience developing against MWS, many of the APIs are of the “POST to receive a token that you GET-poll on” variety.
So much spam would go away if we just charged $1 per 5000 emails. Normal humans would be fine. Mailing lists would need charge, but it would be minimal for most useful mailing lists.
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