fieldnotes
AWSMP Discovery API - what you get and what you don’t
2026-04-14
What’s this one all about then ?
So the obvious thing to do with the new AWSMP Discovery API was to compare it to the browser UI/UX and see what was the same or different.
Whats here and what isnt ?
Lets take search first then product.
For search, we’ll put in a query, lets say “grc automation”
Now lets look at the left hand menu, which is categories. Disco API allows you to get this info back, or preset/navigate/select from it using SearchFacets - thats a tick. While that left hand menu content “seems” trivial to scrape with a one page load and a DOM parser, its generally better not to go down that path if you need to work with that data when you can get it back as JSON. Assuming of course you have an AWS account and a user with the right IAM permissions to call the Disco API (see our earlier post).
Counter point, in the browser, we also get an AI summary of the result set “sometimes” (when there’s “reasonable” commonality between results, rather than it being a true mixed bag. That summary isn’t available over the Disco API.
Here’s what you’re missing:
For product, we can again either select an item off the search or just pass in the prodview- ID if we know what it is. Doesn’t matter how we do this, so lets just pick one. https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-3xw4sjqv2pb22 will do.
AWSMP Discovery API and using GetProduct method and GetListing method allows us to get back most of the info that appears on the page, which is helpful because DOM parsing it out from a scrape isn’t that pleasant.
But whats missing - compared to the browsing experience - are these two pieces:
- Similar Products - there’s nothing on the Disco API for this part.
You’re missing this section with the Disco API:
- Customer Reviews - you can get the reviews metadata (eg counts, sources as a part of XXX), but not the actual reviews.
Here’s what you’re missing:
Now in all cases - the missing bits for search, its probably fair to say that most programmatic interactions with AWSMP via Discovery API are not likely to be looking for the AWSMP-provided AI summary/overview or the potential comparisons or the review details.
If you’re building some kind of overlay on AWSMP though, its pretty likely your users are going to care about similar products and about actual customer reviews (rather than just the counts).
Other Observations
There are other things that the Discovery API does not provide either for example:
- Ranked search position (there is no rank integer in the response - so if you want ranks, you have to page scrape …)
- Search results ranked by Latest Updated
- Search results ranked by Customer Reviews
The Discovery API doesn’t provide very much support for seller info either - you can get an ID, but there’s no way to get from the seller ID to the seller profile directly via the API, unlike the UI which provides this with 1-click.
The wrap up
The availability of the AWS Marketplace Discovery API unlocks a heap of new possibilities in terms of sourcing, embedding, analysing marketplace data and interacting with AWS Marketplace from other surfaces like CRMs. There’s still gaps, but we’re getting a lot closer to a world where a system programmatically work with the Marketplace surface at the same breadth and depth that a user can.