When you use Amazon’s website, you are subjected to their terms of service. The Amazon TOS strictly forbids the collection of keyword ranking data. This page will help you understand the restriction:
Amazon.com Help: Conditions of Use
When you opened an Amazon account, you will have been presented with these terms.
The portion of this agreement you need to know about is:
“Amazon or its content providers grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable license to access and make personal and non-commercial use of the Amazon Services. This license does not include any resale or commercial use of any Amazon Service, or its contents; any collection and use of any product listings, descriptions, or prices; any derivative use of any Amazon Service or its contents; any downloading or copying of account information for the benefit of another merchant; or any use of data mining, robots, or similar data gathering and extraction tools.”
We at SellerLegend pride ourselves on being 100% Amazon TOS compliant. The way we achieve this is by exclusively using the developer tools made available by Amazon for developers like us to access your Seller Central Account.
Amazon allows developers access to seller’s accounts by way of a method called the Merchant Web Services Application Program Interface (MWS API). You would expect the API to allow access to all the seller’s data. Regrettably, Amazon has chosen to limit and or restrict access to certain types of data, and therefore MWS API access to the following is not possible:
- Product Review Tracking
- Keyword Rankings
- Product Research/Product Scouting
While we are quite capable of providing access to that data within SellerLegend, this would require us to use non-approved Amazon methods to do so (the use of robots to do screen scraping). Would we use such methods, there is a chance that Amazon could penalize not only SellerLegend but also its users (that means … you).
Denying ourselves the use of the illegal screen scraping method to reach the types of data not accessible by the standard MWS API puts us at a significant competitive disadvantage, as other suppliers of similar services do provide access to such data. However, we decided early on that we would never risk the loss of your selling privileges. And granted, the likelihood of such risk materializing is probably infinitesimal at this particular time. But we have all seen Amazon take drastic adverse action elsewhere when its rules were violated, even when such violations had been tolerated for a long time.
