Amazon API submitting requests too quickly

Question

I am creating a games comparison website and would like to get Amazon prices included within it. The problem I am facing is using their API to get the prices for the 25,000 products I already have.

I am currently using the ItemLookup from Amazons API and have it working to retrieve the price, however after about 10 results I get an error saying 'You are submitting requests too quickly. Please retry your requests at a slower rate'.

What is the best way to slow down the request rate?

Thanks,

Answer 1

If your application is trying to submit requests that exceed the maximum request limit for your account, you may receive error messages from Product Advertising API. The request limit for each account is calculated based on revenue performance. Each account used to access the Product Advertising API is allowed an initial usage limit of 1 request per second. Each account will receive an additional 1 request per second (up to a maximum of 10) for every $4,600 of shipped item revenue driven in a trailing 30-day period (about $0.11 per minute).

From Amazon API Docs

If you're just planning on running this once, then simply sleep for a second in between requests.

If this is something you're planning on running more frequently it'd probably be worth optimising it more by making sure that the length of time it takes the query to return is taken off that sleep (so, if my API query takes 200ms to come back, we only sleep for 800ms)