Best Practices for Catalogs

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Important

The Buy with Prime API is offered as a preview and might change as we receive feedback and iterate on the interfaces. We are sharing this early documentation to help you learn about the Buy with Prime API as we write and iterate on the content.

This topic provides best practices for using the Buy with Prime Catalog interface.

Which product identifier to use

When you Create and Manage Catalogs, you can associate each product with multiple product identifiers. Although you can use any of these values to identify a product when you call the Buy with Prime API, we recommend that use your own identifiers, such as the following IDs:

For example, when you render a product detail page, you likely already have a listing ID (external product ID) in the context.

Make sure that you use a stable, immutable value that uniquely identifies your product. For example, if a product's listing is regenerated whenever the details of a product in an internal catalog change, it's better to use the SKU as the ID. If a listing identifier is stable and stays the same throughout the product lifecycle but the SKU can change, the external ID is a better option.

Calculating inventory for product detail pages and checkout

The available number of products is a point in time calculation, with potential delays. To determine whether a shopper can order an item through Buy with Prime, we recommend that you determine inventory based on whether a call to the Delivery Preview interface succeeds. If you encounter an ItemAmountUnavailable error, the requested quantity isn't available. For examples of calling the Delivery Preview interface, see Create a Delivery Preview for a Product Detail Page and Create a Delivery Preview for Checkout.

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