Three months ago, I spent the weekend, excited and overjoyed to build a simple tool. It’d take any Amazon product and give you my affiliate link :)
I had access to the APIs. Why? Because I needed to get a single sale in 30 days which I got.
Then, it became three. I still survived.
Friends and family would still buy it.
But last week, I got a message from a friend and it said
Hey, your tool isn’t tooling, bro
I thought:
A minor glitch, will be fixed in a day or two. I asked him to wait :)
And it’s been 7 days today and as I read more, I got to know:
Amazon has quietly raised the barrier to entry.
Currently, my API says this:
{
"error": "Amazon API Error: Request failed: Forbidden"
}the threshold has effectively shifted to 10 qualified sales in the trailing 30 days to maintain stable access.
If you don’t sell, you don’t code.
This creates a massive blocker for hobbyist developers.
- You want the API to build a tool that generates sales (like a book recommender).
- Amazon wants sales before they give you the API.
It is the ultimate deadlock
-.-
Why Amazon Did This?
To be fair to Amazon, the API is obviously expensive to run.
They don’t want thousands of students spamming their servers with millions of requests if those requests don’t lead to revenue.
They want Affiliates, not Data Scrapers :)
What if you are just pinging their API to get price history for a personal project, you are a cost center?
They want to ensure you are a profit center before handing over the keys.
In case we are meeting for the first time, come over here, it’ll be worth the roller coaster of articles that are gonna come up in the next few weeks.