Amazon API: “RequestThrottled” and how to fix it?

Amazon API: “RequestThrottled” and how to fix it?

API stands for Application Programming Interface and is the method we use in our plugin to connect with Amazon to retrieve product information. Without a working API key that you generate from your Amazon account, our plugin cannot connect to Amazon’s servers.

Error “RequestThrottled” – What does it mean?

Until the beginning of this year, after your account was verified, you could generate an API key and use it without any restrictions to get product details using a plugin such as ours. However, Amazon made some changes regarding their affiliate program.

Some of these new rules set by Amazon are:

• New Affiliate accounts can only have access to API keys after their shop is verified and have generated at least 3 sales.
• New API keys start working only after 48 hours.
• If your account hasn’t generated at least 3 referring sales using Product Advertising API in the last 30 days, your account will lose access to Product Advertising API.
• If you lose access to Product Advertising API 5.0, you can continue to use other product linking tools, such as Site Stripe and generate revenue. You will regain access to Product Advertising API 5.0 within two days after your referred sales are shipped.
• Also, according to the Amazon Product Advertising API document, the allowed initial usage limit per day is 8640 requests and the limit for each account will be based on the revenue performance of your Product API during the last 30 days.

If your Amazon Affiliate account does not adhere to these new rules, you would get an error in the API settings page of our plugin called “RequestThrottled – Something went wrong. Please check your API keys”

How to check if your API keys work?

There are 2 ways to test your API keys:

1. Quick Check via Amazon API Key Checker (Unoffical)
   This was developed by us to do a quick API check. If you do not believe in the results, then we would recommend using the official tool provided by Amazon listed below.
2. Amazon’s AWS Scratchpad (Official)
   The official Scratchpad provides a more detailed error message the result of this can also be used to send to Amazon for API related issues.

How to test your API keys with the scratchpad tool:

Amazon’s AWS Scratchpad can be used to get a more detailed error report related to your API keys. You can follow these steps to test.

1. Go to Amazon’s AWS Scratchpad
2. Click on “ItemSearch” option in the left column. This will open a form where you would need to enter your Amazon API key ID & secret access key along with your tracking ID.
3.  After entering the details, click on the “Run Request” button.
4. The result of this would be displayed under the “Response” section on the same page.

NOTE: In case it’s not working you can be sure your API key has been blocked by Amazon for not adhering to one of the rules listed above.

How to resolve the “RequestThrottled” error?

While these points do not guarantee that it would make the API keys to work, they can help you

• For newly created API keys, wait for at least 48 hours for the keys to become active.
• Make sure you generate at least 3 referring sales every 30 day period.
• Do not use the same API keys on multiple websites unless you are generating enough sales to allow more API requests.

For API errors, there is nothing we can do from our side and for any further queries you would need get in touch with Amazon Associates team directly via https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/home/contact

If you are new to the Amazon Affiliate program and looking to generate your first 3 sales in order to get API access, then I recommend our other plugin called “Easy Amazon Links“. It does not require an active API key and helps you to place affiliate links easily.