Some products in our inventory require personalisation … eg. A mug with your name printed on it, or a Chocolate bar with a “Happy Birthday Gary” printed on the wrapper.

When ordering these product from Amazon – before checkout, the customer has to complete the requested customisation – on a popup form. These customisation options are configured through the Amazon Seller administration module.

When fulfilling the order, the customisation data has to be downloaded from the Amazon Seller portal. This process is currently manual and, as you can imagine, when we have tens or hundreds of customised orders, this can take a significant amount of time.

Once the data is downloaded (it’s provided as a zipped archive) we combine it with data from corresponding Storefeeder order and then generate whatever output is required.

Requirement

We are aware that Amazon provide an API to enable us to do what we need – however – (1) it requires a development account, (2) it would be simpler to go to a single API to get all data, rather that synchronising between the two.

There are a number of ways that we envisage the integration could work.Either of these mechanisms would work for us …

1) On-demand … We would call a SF WebAPI – with a Storefeeder order Id, the web response would provide the Amazon personalization package (the zip) in a response stream.
2) We provide a Dropbox account. When retrieving order data from Amazon, test if the order has personalisation data – if it does, then download the corresponding personalisation data – and write it to the dropbox.

In addition, with option 2, if the Storefeeder Order was serialised into a JSON document and then stored with the same name as the Amazon package (but different file extension) – then our process could be simplified. We would not require the existing API. We would simply enumerate through our dropbox – using the JSON documents to provide the Order data.