Integrating with Amazon Seller Central

As a third-party logistics (3PL) warehouse, Shipvine can physically store your inventory in our warehouse and then pick, pack, and ship your orders to your customers. It's like outsourcing the job of running a warehouse to Shipvine, allowing you to focus on running your business. If we do our job correctly, then your customer never realizes that Shipvine was involved in the process.

If you are selling on Amazon Seller Central, then Shipvine can integrate with the Amazon Selling Partner API (SP-API, formerly MWS) to perform the following tasks automatically:

1. download your seller-fulfilled (MFN) orders into the Shipvine Logistics warehouse management system so that we can pick, pack, and ship the order
   
2. keep your inventory quantities updated in Amazon Seller Central
   
3. write tracking numbers back to the orders in Amazon Seller Central after we've shipped the order
   

Of course, security and privacy is very important, so any personally-identifiable information (PII) such as the customer name or street address is automatically and irrevocably redacted from our Shipvine Logistics warehouse management system within 30 days. Amazon requires this, and we strive to make sure we are always within 100% compliance with their policies.

Please note that our integration is only available for the United States, Canada, and Mexico marketplaces within Amazon Seller Central. We don't support any of the other marketplaces at this time.

Setting up the connection

You'll need a Shipvine merchant account to get started, so reach out to our sales team today if you're not already an existing client.

If you already have a merchant account, then reach out to Shipvine Support to get the process started. They'll give you temporary access to a special system at Shipvine called Shipvine Sync, which is a workhorse that runs in the background to shuttle data back and forth between systems like Amazon Seller Central.

Once you've been provisioned that access,

1. Go to the New Amazon SP-API Integration page. Under Properties, paste in your "Shipvine Logistics Merchant Code" that was provided to you by Shipvine Support. You can leave all the rest of the fields blank.

2. Click "Save", and then you'll be redirected to Amazon Seller Central. Log into Amazon Seller Central with the account that you would like to connect.

3. Amazon shows a permission screen that says that "Shipvine Sync" needs to access information from your Amazon Seller Central account. You may deny the request, but then our integration won't work.

4. After you accept the request, you'll be directed back to the Shipvine Sync system with a green message saying that the tokens were generated, and you'll see gobbedly-gook in the "Properties" section.

5. That's it! You're all done, and you can close the browser window.

What information exactly is synced between the two systems?

As we mentioned earlier, the integration uses the Amazon Selling Partner API (SP API) to synchronize information between the two systems.

Pulling down orders as fulfillment requests

About every 30 minutes, our integration will call an Amazon SP API endpoint to retrieve orders in the "Unshipped" or "Partially Shipped" statuses that are seller-fulfilled ("MFN") orders. Then it pushes this information into Shipvine Logistics as a fulfillment request.

It's important to note that for this to work seamlessly, the "Seller SKU" in Amazon Seller Central needs to match the "Merchant Identifier" that you have entered on the Item in Shipvine Logistics for this to work. If they don't match, for example because you left the "Seller SKU" in Amazon Seller Central as an Amazon-generated default, then you can add the "Seller SKU" as an "Item Alias" in Shipvine Logistics, and it'll work that way.

Shipvine then picks, packs, and ships the order as we would with any other fulfillment request belonging to your merchant account.

Pushing inventory numbers from Shipvine Logistics into Amazon Seller Central

About every 30 minutes, our integration will call Shipvine Logistics to look for inventory records that have recently changed. It'll then use an Amazon Selling Partner API (SP API) known as the "POST_INVENTORY_AVAILABILITY_DATA feed" to update the available inventory in your Amazon Seller Central account.

It's important to note that the "Seller SKU" in Amazon Seller Central needs to match the "Merchant Identifier" that you have entered on the Item in Shipvine Logistics for this to work. If they don't match, for example because you left the "Seller SKU" in Amazon Seller Central as an Amazon-generated default, then you can add the "Seller SKU" as an "Item Alias" in Shipvine Logistics, and it'll work that way.

Pushes tracking numbers back to the orders in Amazon Seller Central

After we've shipped a fulfillment request, then obviously the customer wants to know the tracking number! About every 30 minutes, our integration will call Shipvine Logistics to look for fulfillment requests that have recently been shipped. For the ones that correspond to Amazon orders, it'll then use an Amazon Selling Partner API (SP API) known as the "POST_ORDER_FULFILLMENT_DATA feed" to write back the carrier name and the tracking number. Amazon will take care of it from there.

How do you protect personally-identifiable information?

In addition to industry-standard security controls in our production systems and development processes, any Amazon order in our system will have the personally-identifiable information such as the customer name, street address, email address, and phone number overwritten with "AMAZON MWS REDACTED" within 30 days of the shipment. This ensures that Amazon data and customer privacy is protected as soon as the process that required the personally-identifiable information has finished.

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