How we use Amazon's APIs
Every Amazon authorization we hold, what it is used for, and which part of the product uses it. Last updated: September 14, 2026.
Who we are
OptimalCentral is operated by Optimal Inc., an independent software vendor building analysis tools for Amazon sellers. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Amazon. Every connection is authorized by the seller who owns the account, is used only to provide that seller the features they use, and can be disconnected at any time from inside the product.
We do not resell Amazon data, do not publish audience data, and do not pool one seller's data into another seller's reports. Our reporting is generated per account, for that account holder.
Selling Partner API — roles granted
Amazon granted these seven roles on August 19, 2026. We use them to pull reports and catalog data into analysis. Two of these calls change something in your Seller Central account, both through the Product Listing role (Brand and Enterprise plans, and the 14-day free trial), and both worth naming: when you approve a Listing Fix field by field, that approved text is submitted back to that listing and you can roll it back in one click; and when you approve a price in the Repricer, that one price is submitted for that one SKU, and the price the SKU had is kept with the change so you can restore it in one click. Neither runs on its own — nothing is submitted until you approve that specific change. Nothing else on this list changes anything in your Seller Central account. Messages to your buyers are covered in the next section.
Some of that data reaches us as events rather than by polling: for connected seller accounts on the Brand and Enterprise plans and in the free trial, we subscribe to Amazon's push notifications for offer changes, pricing-health changes (an offer losing featured-offer eligibility), account status changes, and FBA inventory availability changes, so a change can be surfaced in minutes instead of on the next scheduled pull. We also subscribe to notices that a report or a Data Kiosk query we requested for your account has finished processing, so we can collect it without repeatedly asking. A subscription delivers events about your own account to us and changes nothing in it; when you disconnect, we stop processing pushed events about your account, and the underlying subscription is deleted once no connected account uses it.
| Role | What we use it for today | Where it shows up |
|---|---|---|
| Product Listing | Your listing content, ASINs and catalog attributes, from the merchant listings report and the Listings Items API, plus the Fix Your Products report and Catalog Items lookups (category changes on your listings, and catalog matches for a keyword). This is also the role behind the only two calls that change anything in a seller account — a Listing Fix you approved field by field, and a price you approved in the Repricer for a single SKU | Listing Audit, Listing Generator, Listing Fixes, Product Monitor, Niche Radar, Review Violation Check |
| Pricing | Competing offers and the featured-offer expected price from Amazon's Product Pricing API — the inputs our repricing analysis uses to work out what a SKU's price should be. It is also the role behind the offer-change and pricing-health notifications that can start a Repricer check. Amazon's fee estimate endpoint falls under this role too: when you use the Repricer's margin strategy for a SKU and have entered its unit cost, we ask that endpoint for the referral and fulfillment fees on that SKU at its current price, so the margin floor rests on Amazon's own fee figures. Every call we make under this role is a read: they change nothing in your account, and we make no price-changing call through it. Amazon also accepts this role for the listing, FBA and order reports we already pull, and their price and fee columns are where the price figures in your reports come from | Repricer, Profit Dashboard, Inventory Planner |
| Amazon Fulfillment | FBA inventory levels, the Inventory Ledger and stranded-inventory reports, customer returns, estimated referral and fulfillment fees, the Reimbursements report, removal order and removal shipment reports, FBA inventory availability notifications, and inbound shipment records (what you sent vs what was received) | Inventory Planner, Returns & Restock, Reimbursements, Inbound Shipments |
| Finance and Accounting | Settlement, fee, and refund events, so profit figures match real payouts — and refund events for reimbursement claim detection | Profit Dashboard, Reimbursements |
| Inventory and Order Tracking | Order and sales history for demand, sell-through and restock timing, and to find the shipped orders that review requests and warranty messages go to | Inventory Planner, Returns & Restock, Auto Review Request, Buyer Messages |
| Brand Analytics | Your Data Kiosk sales and traffic figures (sessions, page views, Buy Box percentage, unit session percentage) and per-ASIN economics; your Search Query Performance report, pulled for one ASIN at a time instead of exported by hand; and, for vendor accounts, the retail sales, traffic, inventory, forecasting and margin reports. It also covers Amazon’s market-level Top Search Terms report, which Amazon publishes identically to every enrolled brand owner and which describes the marketplace rather than any one account | Sales performance, Search Query Audit, vendor dashboards, Privacy Policy §6 |
| Selling Partner Insights | Amazon’s published review-topic summaries for a product or category — the same figures Product Opportunity Explorer shows — which describe the catalogue item, not your account; your Account Health performance report and account-status notifications; and the seller feedback report that Auto Review Request reads to skip orders that already have feedback | Listing Audit → Review Signal, Product Monitor (Account Health, review trend alerts), Auto Review Request, Privacy Policy §2 and §6 |
Selling Partner API — messages to your buyers
Amazon granted these two on the same date. Both tools are live on the Brand and Enterprise plans, and in the 14-day free trial at up to 5 sends a day; each stays off for an account until the seller turns it on and authorizes the exact configuration.
| Role | What it is used for | Where it shows up |
|---|---|---|
| Buyer Communication | Deliver a warranty document you upload for an ASIN to buyers of that ASIN, through Amazon's own warranty-extension template. The API call carries no free text — an attachment and coverage dates only | Buyer Messages |
| Buyer Solicitation | Send Amazon's review-and-feedback request for orders that qualify. The API call carries no content of ours: Amazon writes and delivers the request, and a request sent this way uses up that order's one request, so the Request a Review button in Seller Central then reports it as already requested | Auto Review Request |
Both buyer-facing tools follow the same rules, and those rules were in the product before the role was granted: sending is off unless you turn it on; you sign a one-time authorization for the exact configuration you set, and changing any part of it ends that authorization until you confirm again; orders that were returned or have not shipped are excluded before anything is sent, and Auto Review Request also skips orders that already carry seller feedback; each tool has a daily send limit; every send is logged against its order; and neither tool stores or uses buyer names, email addresses, or any other buyer contact detail — Amazon addresses and delivers the message. The one place such a detail reaches us is the rater email column in Amazon's seller feedback report, which Auto Review Request drops as the report is read.
Amazon Ads API
If you connect an Amazon Ads account, we read your advertising profiles, campaign structure, and performance reports to produce advertising audits, daily monitoring, and optimization suggestions. That same authorization can submit changes back to your advertising account — bid and budget changes, negative keywords, pausing or re-enabling campaigns and product ads, and creating a new Sponsored Products campaign (campaign, ad group, product ad, keywords and campaign negatives) that you built in the Campaign Builder and asked us to create. A created campaign arrives paused and spends nothing until you switch it on in the ads console.
Those writes come in two kinds. Bid and budget changes, and any other campaign change, are proposed and wait for you to approve each one. Three kinds of rule that change no bid or budget, have their own daily limit and can be reversed run unattended, but only after you authorize that exact rule configuration: dayparting, which pauses and re-enables the campaigns you pick on your schedule; negative keywords added under a rule you set; and pausing campaigns or product ads while the stock they advertise is low or out. Changing a rule's configuration ends its authorization until you confirm again. Every change is recorded in enough detail to review it, and most can be reversed from the screen where they were made. Two cannot: pausing a keyword or target from the Action Queue, because we do not know the state it was in before and will not guess and switch it back on, and creating a campaign in the Campaign Builder, which stays paused, spending nothing, until you switch it on in the ads console. Disconnecting the account pauses every rule and stops further writes. The full rules are in Section 14.1, "Changes to your Amazon advertising account", of our Terms of Service.
Amazon Marketing Cloud
If your Amazon account has an Amazon Marketing Cloud instance and your plan includes AMC Insights, we run a fixed set of pre-written analytical queries against your own instance and store their results. AMC returns aggregated, privacy-protected outputs; we do not receive or store records about individual shoppers.
What we never do
- We do not hold any Amazon restricted data role — the roles that expose buyer personal information — and our application is registered without restricted data tokens. Buyer names, addresses, and contact details are not available to us, and we have not asked for them.
- We do not sell, share, or resell your Amazon data, and we do not use one seller's data to inform another seller's report.
- We do not change your orders or your inventory, and we never edit a listing or a price on our own initiative. Everything we submit to an Amazon account is on this page: the advertising changes above (approved one by one, or made by a rule you authorized), a Sponsored Products campaign you built and asked us to create, which arrives paused, a Listing Fix whose text you approved field by field, a price you approved in the Repricer for a single SKU, and the review requests and warranty messages you authorized. Every one is logged; most account changes can be reversed (the two that cannot are named in the Amazon Ads API section above), and message sends are capped per day. There is no standing authorization to change a price, no bulk approval and no scheduled job that can change one: every price we submit comes from you approving that exact number for that one SKU. Before we submit it we re-read the live price and refuse if it has moved since you saw it, and we re-check your own floor and ceiling in case you changed them after approving.
- We do not keep working after you disconnect. Disconnecting in OptimalCentral deletes the stored authorization, so syncing, advertising rules and message sends stop at once, and the synced data is then deleted as our Privacy Policy describes. Revoking us from Amazon's side has the same effect on our next call, because the authorization no longer works.
Questions
If you are reviewing our application, or you are a seller who wants detail on any of the above, write to us at [email protected] or through our contact form. Data handling and retention are covered in the Privacy Policy; the rules governing automated changes are in the Terms of Service.