← Back to Blog

How to Use VBA for Amazon Seller Fetch

Amazon provides a powerful service for sellers to connect and sell their products to millions of customers worldwide. With the advent of automation, it’s become increasingly important to integrate these services into your business workflows. For those who use Excel in their operations, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) can be a real game-changer. In this post, we’ll discuss how to use VBA for Amazon Seller Fetch.
By Saturn Cloud | | Miscellaneous

How to Use VBA for Amazon Seller Fetch

Amazon provides a powerful service for sellers to connect and sell their products to millions of customers worldwide. With the advent of automation, it’s become increasingly important to integrate these services into your business workflows. For those who use Excel in their operations, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) can be a real game-changer. In this post, we’ll discuss how to use VBA for Amazon Seller Fetch.

What is Amazon Seller Fetch?

Amazon Seller Fetch is a method to retrieve data from Amazon Seller Central, the hub where sellers manage their Amazon sales. Sellers often need to fetch data like sales reports, customer reviews, and more for analysis and decision-making. Manual retrieval can be tedious, which is where automation tools like VBA come in.

Why VBA?

VBA, or Visual Basic for Applications, is an event-driven programming language developed by Microsoft. It’s primarily used within Microsoft Office applications to automate tasks. If your operations heavily rely on Excel, using VBA to automate Amazon Seller Fetch can save you significant time and effort.

Prerequisites

To follow this guide, you need:

  • A basic understanding of VBA programming.
  • Access to Amazon Marketplace Web Service (Amazon MWS).
  • An Amazon seller account with permission to access the necessary data.

Step-by-Step Guide to Amazon Seller Fetch with VBA

Step 1: Set up Amazon MWS

To set up Amazon MWS:

  1. Log into your Amazon seller account.
  2. Navigate to the ‘Appstore’ then ‘Manage Your Apps’.
  3. Click ‘Authorize new developer’ and enter the developer’s name and ID.

Note: For personal use, you are the developer. Keep the ‘Access Key ID’ and ‘Secret Key’ safe; you’ll need them later.

Step 2: Install the Necessary Libraries

To install the necessary libraries:

  1. Open Excel and navigate to ‘Developer’ > ‘Visual Basic’.
  2. In the VBA editor, go to ‘Tools’ > ‘References’ and select ‘Microsoft XML, v6.0’ and ‘Microsoft WinHTTP Services, version 5.1’.

These libraries allow your VBA to make HTTP requests and parse XML responses.

Step 3: Create Your VBA Code

Create a new module and start coding. Below is a simplified example of a VBA code to fetch orders from Amazon MWS:

Sub FetchAmazonData()
    Dim winHttp As New WinHttpRequest
    Dim xmlDoc As New MSXML2.DOMDocument60

    ' Define endpoint and parameters
    Dim endpoint As String
    Dim parameters As String
    endpoint = "https://mws.amazonservices.com/Orders/2013-09-01"
    parameters = "AWSAccessKeyId=" & "YourAccessKey" & "&SellerId=" & "YourSellerId"

    ' Make the request
    winHttp.Open "GET", endpoint & "?" & parameters, False
    winHttp.Send

    ' Load response into an XML document
    xmlDoc.loadXML winHttp.responseText

    ' Parse and print the data
    Dim order As MSXML2.IXMLDOMNode
    For Each order In xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName("Order")
        Debug.Print order.selectSingleNode("AmazonOrderId").Text
    Next order
End Sub

Replace “YourAccessKey” and “YourSellerId” with your actual Access Key ID and Seller ID.

Limitations and Best Practices

While VBA is a powerful tool for Amazon Seller Fetch, it’s not without limitations. It’s synchronous, meaning it will block other tasks until it finishes. It’s also limited to Microsoft Office applications. For heavy-duty tasks, consider using other tools like Python or Java with Amazon’s SDKs.

Remember to handle sensitive data like your Access Key ID and Seller ID carefully. Never hard-code them into your scripts. Instead, consider using environment variables or secure config files.

Conclusion

Automating your Amazon Seller Fetch with VBA can save you countless hours of manual data retrieval. This guide provided a basic introduction to the process. However, the possibilities are endless; with a good grasp of VBA and Amazon MWS, you can customize this to fit your exact needs.

Remember, while VBA offers a great starting point for automation, don’t limit yourself to it if your needs grow. Amazon provides SDKs for many other languages that offer more power and flexibility. Happy automating!

About Saturn Cloud

Saturn Cloud is your all-in-one solution for data science & ML development, deployment, and data pipelines in the cloud. Spin up a notebook with 4TB of RAM, add a GPU, connect to a distributed cluster of workers, and more. Join today and get 150 hours of free compute per month.

Try Saturn Cloud Now