Amazon Seller Central API Guide (2026)

Short answer

Amazon has no product called the Seller Central API. When people search for one they mean the Selling Partner API (SP-API), the REST API through which software reads and changes what a seller otherwise handles in Seller Central: orders, listings, inventory, reports, payments and shipments. Advertising is not part of it. Campaigns and ad performance live in the separate Amazon Ads API. A third name that turns up in searches, the Product Advertising API, was an affiliate product and is now deprecated; it never gave access to a seller account.

This page is a map. It says which API stands behind which Seller Central screen, how access works, what is being switched off in the coming months, and when building on these APIs is worth it. It links out to our deeper guides where they exist. All facts were checked against Amazon's SP-API documentation on 10 November 2026. Amazon moved that documentation to the developer-docs.amazon domain; older developer-docs.amazon.com links redirect there.

Three APIs that get confused

Selling Partner API. For sellers and vendors. Orders, shipments, payments, inventory, listings, reports and notifications. It replaced the older Marketplace Web Service; our MWS to SP-API migration article has that history, and the SP-API integration guide covers the first steps of a build.
Amazon Ads API. For advertisers. Sponsored ads and DSP campaigns, bids, budgets and ad reports. It has its own application process, its own hosts and its own consent, even though both use Login with Amazon. See our Amazon Ads API integration guide.
Product Advertising API. For Amazon Associates, to show catalog products on affiliate sites. Amazon's own documentation now carries a deprecation notice: version 5 has been replaced by the Creators API, and calls to it return 403 with a message telling you to migrate. If a tutorial tells a seller to use it for orders or inventory, the tutorial is wrong.

A seller tool that shows profit after ad spend therefore runs two integrations side by side, SP-API and the Ads API, and joins them on ASIN and SKU in its own database.

Which API is behind which Seller Central screen

SP-API is not one API but several dozen, each with its own version, roles and rate limits. The ones behind the screens sellers use every day:

Manage Orders. The Orders API. The current version is v2026-01-01, with searchOrders for lists, getOrder for one order and an includedData parameter that decides whether buyer, recipient or fulfillment details come back. Orders more than two years old are not returned. For bulk history, order reports are cheaper than paging the API.
Inventory. The FBA Inventory API returns quantities in Amazon's network split into fulfillable, inbound, reserved, unfulfillable and researching. Stock you hold yourself is a quantity on the listing, set through the Listings Items API. Shipments into Amazon's warehouses belong to the Fulfillment Inbound API.
Catalog and listings. The Listings Items API creates and updates your offers, fully or partially, the Product Type Definitions API tells you which attributes a product type requires, and the Catalog Items API reads Amazon's catalog. Bulk changes go through the Feeds API as JSON_LISTINGS_FEED. The old flat-file and XML listing feeds, such as POST_PRODUCT_DATA, were removed on 3 December 2025, so any tutorial that still uploads them is out of date.
Reports and Business Reports. Two mechanisms. The Reports API requests or schedules predefined report types and hands you a file. Data Kiosk takes a GraphQL query, so you choose the fields and granularity yourself, and returns JSON Lines; its seller analytics dataset spans sales, traffic, promotions, account health, search, reviews, defects and returns.
Payments. The Finances API, current version v2024-06-19, lists transactions as they happen, so you do not wait for a statement period to close. Settlement reports give the closed periods; Amazon generates them on its own schedule and you can only fetch them, not request them. The Product Fees API estimates fees for a SKU or ASIN before you sell.
Pricing. The Product Pricing API returns pricing and offer information for catalog products, which is what repricers are built on.
Shipping and fulfillment. Amazon Buy Shipping labels for orders you ship yourself come from the Shipping API v2 in new integrations (the older Merchant Fulfillment API points there), the Fulfillment Outbound API creates Multi-Channel Fulfillment orders out of FBA stock, and confirmShipment in the Orders API reports tracking.
Buyer messages. The Messaging API. Not every message type is available for every order; availability depends on the order's state, the seller type and how many messages were already sent.
Notifications. The Notifications API pushes events such as order changes, offer changes and finished reports to an Amazon SQS queue or Amazon EventBridge, so you poll less. Amazon itself recommends a fallback way to fetch the same information in case delivery is late. Our Notifications API guide walks through the setup.
Campaign Manager. Not SP-API. Everything under Advertising belongs to the Ads API.

Not every screen has an endpoint, and some endpoints exist only in some regions. Before promising a feature, look the operation up in Amazon's role mappings and read its region line.

How access works

You do not get API keys from a settings page. Access is a sequence:

Register as a developer. A seller building for its own company fills in the Developer Profile in Seller Central under Apps and Services, Develop Apps, describing its data use and security controls. Amazon reviews it and opens a case.
Request roles. A role is permission for a group of operations and data: Product Listing, Pricing, Inventory and Order Tracking, Amazon Fulfillment, Finance and Accounting, Brand Analytics and others. Calling an operation without its role returns 403.
Register the application and select, from your approved roles, the ones it uses.
Authorize it for a selling account, which yields a refresh token.
Call the regional endpoint with a short-lived Login with Amazon access token.

Our article on registering an SP-API application covers steps one to three in detail, so this page will not repeat them.

Restricted data. Roles that expose buyer names, addresses or tax data are marked restricted: Direct-to-Consumer Shipping, Tax Invoicing, Tax Remittance, Professional Services and Selling Partner Support. They require more detail on data handling, and for public developers Amazon describes an architecture review with its solutions architects. Historically, calls that return such data needed a Restricted Data Token from the Tokens API in place of the normal access token. The new Orders API changes that for orders: with the right role, buyer and address fields come back without an RDT.

Regions. There are three endpoints: North America (sellingpartnerapi-na.amazon.com) for the US, Canada, Mexico and Brazil; Europe (sellingpartnerapi-eu.amazon.com), which also serves the UK, India, Turkey, the Gulf stores, Egypt and South Africa; and the Far East (sellingpartnerapi-fe.amazon.com) for Japan, Australia and Singapore. Route by Amazon's table, not by continent.

Private or public application

This decision comes before any code, because it sets the authorization flow and the review you face.

Private. Built for your own organization. You authorize it yourself in Seller Central, with no OAuth screens, and it can stay in draft status. Amazon's authorization limits allow a private application ten self-authorizations, which is enough for a company with several accounts and not enough to serve clients.
Public. Built for other sellers, who grant access through OAuth, started from the Selling Partner Appstore or from your website. Amazon requires a public website that describes the service, and its registration page says public developers must list the application in the Appstore. Until it is listed, a public seller application is capped at 25 OAuth authorizations; listed applications have no cap.

An agency that builds one integration per client often does best with a private application registered in each client's account. A software vendor has no real alternative to public.

What it costs: the 2026 fee story

In late 2025 Amazon announced fees for third-party developers, an annual subscription plus monthly usage fees tied to the number of GET calls, to begin in 2026. We described that plan in our article on SP-API fees and call optimization. It did not go ahead. Amazon's announcement page is now headed as a cancellation of the third-party developer fees and states that Amazon "will not move forward with the SP-API usage and annual fees at this time".

So on the day we checked, SP-API access carries no Amazon fee for either private or public developers. "At this time" is not a promise, and the techniques in that article still pay off for a different reason: rate limits. Every operation has a usage plan, a rate and a burst enforced with a token bucket, and plans vary by operation, account and application. Reports, Data Kiosk and notifications in place of repeated GET calls are how an integration stays inside them.

What is being switched off

Amazon keeps a deprecation schedule. Deprecated means no further development; removed means calls fail. The entries that matter for a seller integration today:

Orders API v0. getOrders, getOrder, getOrderItems, getOrderBuyerInfo, getOrderAddress and getOrderItemsBuyerInfo were deprecated on 28 January 2026 and are removed on 27 March 2027. The migration guide maps all six onto searchOrders and getOrder in v2026-01-01.
Old settlement reports. GET_V2_SETTLEMENT_REPORT_DATA_FLAT_FILE and GET_V2_SETTLEMENT_REPORT_DATA_XML were deprecated on 17 March 2025 with a removal date of 11 November 2026, the day after this check. The replacement is GET_V2_SETTLEMENT_REPORT_DATA_FLAT_FILE_V2, which folds the price columns into amount-type, amount-description and amount. A parser written for the old layout will not read the new file.
Finances API v0. listFinancialEvents and its two siblings by group and by order were deprecated on 21 July 2025 and are removed on 27 August 2027. Move to v2024-06-19.
Notifications. ORDER_STATUS_CHANGE was removed on 29 July 2026; ORDER_CHANGE is the type to subscribe to. Payload version 1.0 of LISTINGS_ITEM_ISSUES_CHANGE went on 26 August 2026.
Catalog Items API v0. The v0 operation listCatalogCategories was removed on 26 August 2026.
Data Kiosk. The first sales and traffic dataset, analytics_salesAndTraffic_2023_11_15, was removed on 27 March 2026.

If your integration was written before 2025 and nobody has touched it since, check it against this list this week, starting with settlements.

Build on SP-API, or buy the data layer

Building directly makes sense when the integration is the product, when it writes into your own ERP or warehouse system, or when the logic is specific to how your company works. Expect the first call to take a day and the production system to take months. The parts that take the time are not the endpoints: asynchronous reports and their backfill, re-pulling data that Amazon restates, per-operation throttling, token and role management across accounts, schema changes like the settlement one above, and monitoring so that a silent gap is noticed the same day. Our post on how to build an Amazon data connector goes through those layers.

If what you need is the data, already joined and kept current, the pipeline does not have to be yours. DataDoe, the product our team engineers, keeps Seller Central, Vendor Central and Amazon Ads data in 130+ documented tables that developers reach through a REST API, BigQuery or MCP. Its page for developers shows the access options, and Amazon data layer vs raw SP-API compares the two routes point by point.

A simple test: write down what your system must do that no off-the-shelf layer does. If the list is empty, buy. If it holds one or two items, buy the data and build only those. If it is long, build.

Where to go next

Deltologic has built on SP-API since 2020 and is an Amazon partner. If you are deciding between private and public, facing a restricted-role review, or holding an integration that still calls Orders v0, our marketplace integrations and API migrations pages describe how we work. Tell us what you have and which Seller Central screens you need behind an API, and an engineer will answer with a concrete next step.

Frequently asked questions

Is there an Amazon Seller Central API?

Not under that name. Programmatic access to what a seller does in Seller Central is the Selling Partner API (SP-API). Advertising is handled by the separate Amazon Ads API.

Is the Amazon Selling Partner API free?

As of 10 November 2026, yes. Amazon announced an annual subscription and usage fees for third-party developers and then cancelled them, stating it will not move forward with the SP-API usage and annual fees at this time. Private applications were never in scope of those fees.

When is the Orders API v0 removed?

Amazon's deprecation schedule lists the Orders API v0 operations, including getOrders and getOrder, as deprecated on 28 January 2026 and removed on 27 March 2027. The replacement is the Orders API v2026-01-01 with searchOrders and getOrder.

What is the difference between a private and a public SP-API application?

A private application serves your own organization, is self-authorized and is limited to ten self-authorizations. A public application serves other sellers through OAuth, must be listed in the Selling Partner Appstore, and is capped at 25 seller authorizations until it is listed.