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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

As Amazon doesn't offer an API for this, how's it done? Scraping? Hordes of low-wage folks filing orders manually? What's stopping Amazon from blocking this?

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We use mostly automated processes, with manual intervention only for rare edge cases. One thing that's surprised us is just how many (i.e., non-rare) edge cases there are when you take into account shipping exceptions, order constraints, etc. We believe we are on solid footing both legally and technically, and this has been supported by three years of reliable operation.

Unfortunately we're unable to use most affiliate programs. At the same time, we're mostly interested in building a framework that easily scales across to all merchants.

I'm curious about why Amazon doesn't have an API for this.

Why would they need one? Amazon (in terms of the shopping site) is geared to consumers. Even if she could, why would my mother write a script to order things from Amazon? By using the site, you are exposed to their attempts to convince you to buy other products, or a more expensive version of their current product.

I don't assume anything about your mother, but if she ran a business that (1) had some sort of computerized record-keeping and (2) used Amazon-appropriate supplies at a rate that was fairly predictable from those records (although not necessarily predictable per time period), a script targeting this service could save her a lot of time.

Now, Amazon might feel like they don't make enough money from such an unimaginative customer to justify the cost of the service. I don't see how it would steal sales from them, however, until it starts using other suppliers as well. Maybe they'll acquire before that gets turned on?

I would have to imagine that if you order things with that regularity, wholesale would be a cheaper option than via Amazon.

You'd think, but you'd often be wrong. If you're a small retailer, even with the "wholesale discount" ordering from the major US wholesalers, you'll still be undercut by Amazon fairly often. You don't get the equivalent discounts until you're ordering tens of thousands per order from individual suppliers, if ever. That means you're not just a busy store but a busy chain of stores.

My parents own a health food store. They pick up a few of the products they carry whenever they're at Wal-Mart, because Wal-Mart's retail is below the manufacturer's wholesale rate for them. Obviously they don't make much margin on those things, but their customers want them to carry them anyway.

Amazon is fine with acting as a supplier for other stores. They will take sales tax exemption forms for reselling their items.

Maybe, but a common API that can order millions of different products with reliable delivery/billing/returns seems like it would be very useful. Dealing with middleman distributors (who often want you to fax orders in) is a nightmare for many businesses.

Amazon offers better prices than many wholesalers, and much better service than most, in that lead times are shorter and more predictable. If you guarantee your customers you can always install 10 widgets, and you keep 30 in stock, what happens the day after you install 10 widgets for three different customers? With this sort of setup, you receive another 30 widgets by FedEx. Let Amazon do the floor-planning, and spend those resources on something else.

Of course, there's little to prevent this service from signing up big wholesalers as well, if they're able to meet its service requirements.

And probably much more importantly you're exposed to their data mining. They get to monitor what products you buy directly so they can help refine their recommendations.

Even more importantly they get to monitor what products you look at and don't buy. Or what products you buy after looking at another product.

You can sell stuff on Amazon. You can have your orders be filled by Amazon. You can display your products for sale on Amazon on your web page. You can use Amazon to charge people money. The only thing preventing Amazon from being a complete white label web store is the fact that you can't hook it all together and run your own store front where people come to your site, and buy something without going through Amazon's site.

They already offer a white-label web store service: http://webstore.amazon.com/

Filing via MechTurk would be really amusing.

If Mechanical Turk really is behind this, I imagine it might stop being amusing if the Turkers make mistakes and send you incorrect orders...

I think that's what marban was suggesting.

Amazon has a fairly liberal order modification window.

Why not just audit the orders the same way they were entered? A Mechanical Turk redundancy layer if you will.

Considering it's 5% per order, filing orders manually seems likely.

If its manually done... then this an example of how not to do automation.

Unless it's done manually, automatically. Via cloudflower, Amazon Mechanical Turk, or something like it.

If done manually, it would also a great example of identifying a need before building a product. As long as it looks automatic why would the API user care.

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