Amazon has recently published a brand new ‘Developer’s Code Of Conduct’ which has significant implications both for us as developers but also for you as sellers.
You can read the full code of conduct here:
http://docs.developer.amazonservices.com/…/DG_CodeOfConduct…
It is quite short but telling. Let me extract the 3 clauses which I think are noteworthy:
- Customers and sellers trust that you will protect information about them. Don’t publicly disclose or share information obtained through MWS (for instance, a seller’s sales revenue or an item’s product description) with any third parties. Do not do this even if you omit or obfuscate the seller’s identity or if you share aggregated seller data without identifying individual sellers.
- Don’t help or allow sellers to violate Amazon’s terms. If you discover that a seller is using your service to violate Amazon terms that apply to the seller, you must immediately notify Amazon and cut off the seller’s MWS access through your service.
- Don’t use robots to programmatically read from (also known as ‘scraping’), or write information to (e.g. creating support contacts), Seller Central or Amazon’s marketplaces
The first clause is important because that puts an end to screenprints and demos using obfuscation. You will notice that ours are literally hand-crafted. No info is obfuscated, but each piece is meticulously replaced by fake data using the browser’s ‘Developers’s Tool’ invoked through the Inspect Element context menu in the browser.
It is further important as it now makes it illegal to provide services like keyword tools, PPC trend analysis, or even product category trends tools or lists (at least, that is how we read it)
The second clause is more significant. If you help a seller to break TOS, you are in Amazon’s cross-hairs. If the developer is in their cross-hairs, where do you think the seller will be?
The third clause is an old chestnut that is easily discounted by both sellers and many of our competitors.
Discuss.