DataForSEO Brain

Merchant API (Capability)

4 min read

Merchant API (Capability)

The Merchant API returns ecommerce search data from Amazon and Google Shopping: keyword product results, ASIN/product detail, seller offers, specifications, and reviews, delivered through the Task workflow (Amazon also offers Live). Sits under DataForSEO Brain → Concepts.

Overview

Merchant is DataForSEO’s product-marketplace scraping layer. It covers two engines: Amazon (/v3/merchant/amazon/...) and Google Shopping (/v3/merchant/google/...). You search by keyword to get a product SERP, look up a single product by ASIN or product_id for full detail, list the sellers offering a product, pull specifications, or fetch reviews. It is the data source behind product research, price monitoring, and competitive merchandising. Most endpoints follow the Task lifecycle (POST then poll tasks_ready then task_get/advanced); Amazon additionally exposes Live variants.

What it covers

  • Amazon: /v3/merchant/amazon/products/task_post (keyword product SERP), /v3/merchant/amazon/asin/task_post (product and its modifications by ASIN), /v3/merchant/amazon/sellers/task_post (seller offers, pricing, ratings). Each has Live live/advanced and live/html variants.
  • Google Shopping: /v3/merchant/google/products/task_post (Shopping product SERP), /v3/merchant/google/product_info/task_post (product detail with sellers, rating, variations), /v3/merchant/google/product_spec/task_post (specification attributes), /v3/merchant/google/sellers/task_post (shops offering a product), /v3/merchant/google/reviews/task_post (product reviews).
  • Config helpers: /v3/merchant/{amazon,google}/locations/ and .../languages/.

Key parameters / inputs

fieldnotes
keywordsearch term for products endpoints; up to 700 chars
asin / product_idproduct identifier for detail, sellers, spec, reviews
location_code / location_nameone location identifier required
language_code / language_nameone language identifier required
depthAmazon products default 100, max 700
sort_byrelevance, price_low_to_high, price_high_to_low, featured, avg_customer_review, newest_arrival (Amazon)
price_min / price_max / departmentAmazon product filters
priority1 normal or 2 high (costs more)
idtask UUID for task_get (valid 30 days)

Response / what you get back

Amazon ASIN returns asin, title, author (brand), price_from, price_to, currency, a rating object (value, votes_count, rating_max), sellers, product_information, categories, product_images_list, and top_global_reviews. Amazon Products SERP returns items[] with type, rank, title, url, price, asin, rating, and delivery_info, plus se_results_count. Google Shopping Products returns items[] with rank_group, rank_absolute, title, seller, price, currency, product_images, product_rating, and delivery_info. Product Info adds sellers, rating, variations, and specifications; Sellers returns domain, total_price, seller_name, and rating; Reviews returns rating, rating_groups, top_keywords, and per-review review_text, author, publication_date, and rating.

Cost & method notes

  • Billing is per task at POST time; results are retrievable free for 30 days. See cap-task-vs-live-execution and cap-queue-priority-cost-model.
  • Recent change (2026-06-10): real-time Live endpoints added to the Amazon Merchant API. Amazon Merchant was task-based only before this; the update introduced Live mode for real-time Amazon data (no task-post then poll tasks_ready then task_get wait). Live applies to the Amazon products, asin, and sellers functions via their live/advanced and live/html paths where applicable, so latency-sensitive ASIN/product lookups no longer need the queue. Google Shopping is still Standard/task-only and has no Live variant (calling a Shopping live path returns 40402, a non-existent-path error, not an add-on block). See cap-task-vs-live-execution and dec-live-vs-standard-vs-priority.
  • Amazon endpoints support both Standard (task) and Live methods; Google Shopping endpoints are Standard-only.
  • Priority 2 (high) costs more than priority 1. In the cost log, a /v3/merchant/google/products/live/advanced call returned task_status_code 40402 with cost: 0.0. 40402 means the URL path does not exist: Google Shopping simply has no Live variant, so that path is invalid. It is not an add-on or permission error (an add-on block returns 40204, not 40402).

When to use / how it fits

Merchant is the core of play-ecommerce-product-research (Amazon/Shopping SERP + product detail + reviews), paired with cap-labs-keyword-research Amazon keywords and cap-app-data-api for apps. For pure Amazon keyword/competitor analytics over a pre-indexed database, use the Labs Amazon endpoints instead. Route jobs via dec-which-api-for-which-job and weigh queue vs live via dec-live-vs-standard-vs-priority.

Gotchas / limits

  • Merchant is an add-on; Google Shopping is Standard-only (no Live variant). The 40402 on the live call is a “URL path does not exist” error from calling a non-existent Live path, not an add-on/permission block (those return 40204).
  • 2000 combined POST+GET calls/min; max 100 tasks per POST; task ids valid 30 days.
  • Location/language support varies by marketplace; validate with the locations/languages helpers before posting.
  • Use product_id (not ASIN) for Google Shopping detail endpoints; the two engines do not share identifiers.
  • Amazon asin lookups return the product plus the ASINs of all its modifications (size, color, variant), so a single call can fan out into a family of related listings.
  • The advanced task_get returns structured fields while html returns the raw page; choose advanced for parsing and html only when you need the original markup.
  • Amazon sort_by and price_min/price_max only apply to the products SERP endpoint, not to ASIN or sellers lookups.
  • Reviews and ratings come from the marketplace at scrape time, so a product with few reviews returns a sparse rating object rather than an error.

Sources

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