Developer IDs and Seller Accounts
I have recently spent days trying to figure out how to give 3rd party developers (my employees actually) access to my Seller account so that they can develop an application for me that uses the MWS APIs. The responses from Amazon support were not very helpful. But here is what I have finally determined, along with some questions about why Amazon has it set up this way.
Here is the best response I got from Amazon support: “for your developer to access their developer credentials they will have to access their Seller Central account”
Does this mean that the only way that a third party developer can obtain a Developer ID is to open their own Seller Central account. Once they do that, they can then give me their Developer ID that I can add to my list of third party developers in my Seller Central account.
This seems a bit crazy for the following reasons,
- If I, Seller A, employ 3 developers, then each of them has to open their own Seller Central account, i.e. Seller B, D and E. They are not sellers, they are developers, so why should they have to go though the process of being approved as Sellers?
- I think this will just encourage Seller A to give his User ID and Password to each of his 3 developers – something that is against Amazon policies and something no one would want to do because those developers could make purchases with Seller A’s User ID.
- Or the three developers will just use Seller A’s business information for each of their new Seller Central accounts, i.e. as Seller B, D, and E.
- From Amazon’s point of view, aren’t they encouraging a lot of Seller accounts that are really for the same company or have no intention of doing any selling?
But just to clarify,
- Having an approved developer account at http://developer.amazon.com, has nothing to do with being able to do development work for a Seller.
- Being added as a users to a Seller’s account on http://sellercentral.amazon.com, has nothing to do with those users being able to do development for that Seller
- The only way a 3rd party developer can do work for a Seller is to open their own Seller account.
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SicommNet,
It is confusing. I have been trying to figure this all out for a month. It is getting clearer, but, it is still not totally clear to me yet. I posted more questions today to try and get more clarification at:
I will answer your questions based on my current understanding. Hopefully Amazon will chime in to make any needed corrections.
You said: “develop an application for me”
Each company can only have one seller account. For an application being developed for use by your own company only and will not to be used by other sellers: Your company is to apply for your own Developer ID under you current seller account, and during the application process, state that you need MWS access only to your own seller account. The application process can take up to 30 days.
Before applying under your own seller account, study these rules:
http://docs.developer.amazonservices.com/en_US/dev_guide/DG_DataProtectionPolicy.html
http://docs.developer.amazonservices.com/en_US/dev_guide/DG_AcceptableUsePolicy.html
You can add your developer employees to your seller account so they can see the account, and also provide them your developer ID and secret key for their development work after your developer application is approved.
For a 3rd party developer (aka separate legal company) to get a Developer ID, they must open and pay for a live seller account even through they will not be sell anything. Once the seller account is established, they can then apply for a developer ID under that seller account. After the software is developed and working, then you put their developer ID under your seller account to authorize the software to use your seller account.
You asked “The only way a 3rd party developer can do work for a Seller is to open their own Seller account.” 3rd party developer meaning a separate legal company, then yes, that is my understanding. Your own employees can use your own seller account.
You asked “Being added as a users to a Seller’s account…has nothing to do with those users being able to do development for that Seller”. True, that only gives the people you added access to the seller web site, not the programming MWS API.
You asked: “Having an approved developer account…has nothing to do with being able to do development work for a Seller.”. With Amazon selling, there is no such thing as a “developer account”, “test account”, or “staging account”. There is only live seller accounts, which you must have if you sell or if you don’t sell, in order to get a Developer ID. Some seller accounts have developer IDs under their seller account, and some do not.
Hope this helps.
David Nelson
Dynamic Enterprise Technologies Inc
Seattle | Portland | Los Angeles
