Amazon product api get stock availability (In Stock, out of Stock, etc)

Question

I am using product advertising api by Amazon. Its a little lacking to be honest, since there is no way of getting the product name. You can get the title, but that contains the offer "Amazon Kindle 3G, with free wifi..." instead of simply Amazon Kindle 3G.

More importantly, there seems to be no way of getting the stock information. I just need to know if an item is in stock or not. That's all, there seems to be no way of doing that yet. Ama I missing something. I am using the ItemLookup Api. I get some details by using the Large Response Group but no stock information

Answer 1

Although I am using amazon product api with a python wrapper..there is a availability parameter - checkout the amazon doc http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/latest/DG/CHAP_ReturningPriceAndAvailabilityInformation-itemsearch.html

Answer 2

The various 'offers' response groups list 'offers' from Amazon and 3rd party merchants; this data includes availability details as well as pricing for the (just) 1 offer it will tell you about. You can supply a MerchantId parameter forcing that one offer to be from Amazon.

This API has been somewhat limited (i.e. to just 1 offer) since 2011; for fuller info try the MWS API instead.

For a more literal product name, you could try obtaining the UPC or EAN from the ItemAttributes response group, and then looking that up in a non-Amazon UPC database. No idea how well that would work in practice.