Dealing with Amazon Product Advertising API Throttle limits

Question

For those of you who use the Amazon Product Advertising API, what experience have you had with running into their throttle? Supposedly, the limit is set at 1 request per second, is that your experience?

I want my site to grow to be nation-wide, but I'm concerned about its capability to make all the Amazon API requests without getting throttled. We cache all the responses for 24 hours, and also throttle our own users who make too many searches within a short period.

Should I be concerned? Any suggestions?

Answer 1

I believe they have changed it. Per this link: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=199771

Hourly request limit per account = 2,000 + 500 * [Average associate revenue driven per day over the past 30 days period]/24 to a maximum of 25,000 requests per hour.

Answer 2

Here is the latest on request limits that I could find, effective Sept 3rd, 2012.

If your application is trying to submit requests that exceed the maximum request limit for your account, you may receive error messages from Product Advertising API. The request limit for each account is calculated based on revenue performance. Each account used to access the Product Advertising API is allowed an initial usage limit of 1 request per second. Each account will receive an additional 1 request per second (up to a maximum of 10 requests per second) for every $4,600 of shipped item revenue driven per hour in a trailing 30-day period.

https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/advertising/api/detail/faq.html

Answer 3

They have updated their guidelines, you now have more requests when you sell more items.

Effective 23-Jan-2019, the request limit for each account is calculated based on revenue performance attributed to calls to the Product Advertising API (PA API) during the last 30 days.

Each account used for Product Advertising API is allowed an initial usage limit of 8640 requests per day (TPD) subject to a maximum of 1 request per second (TPS). Your account will receive an additional 1 TPD for every 5 cents or 1 TPS (up to a maximum of 10) for every $4320 of shipped item revenue generated via the use of Product Advertising API for shipments in the last 30 days.

Source: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/latest/DG/TroubleshootingApplications.html

Answer 4

Amazon enforces limits on how many calls you can make per hour and per second.

You can increase the former by following the sanctioned route (increase commission revenue) or by privately petitioning Amazon with a valid reason. When whitelisted, your limit will go up to 25,000 calls per hour, which is more than good enough for the vast majority of projects I can think of.

The latter limit is murkier and enforced depending on the type of query you make. My interpretation is that it is meant to keep serial crawlers who do batch item lookups in check. If you are simply doing keyword searches etc., I would not worry so much about it. Otherwise, the solution is to distribute your calls across multiple IPs.

One other point to keep in mind if you are querying multiple locales is to use separate accounts per locale. Some locales are grouped and will count to the same call quota. European Amazons, for instance, form such a pool.