download invoice documents from Amazon - possible? (4 Viewers)

[CJ_London]

Does anyone know if it is possible to download purchase invoices from Amazon to be stored in a windows folder?

I found this link

https://developer-docs.amazon.com/sp-api/reference/getinvoicesdocument

so looks like it is possible - a two stage process to get the document ID's (for a given date?) then submit the ID's to download the documents.

Before I research further and adapt the GET to work in VBA, just wondered if this has already been done..... (I haven't asked ChatGPT yet)

 

[gemma-the-husky]

Is there a rest API available? That might be a possible way.

I checked your link, and that's what it is, but it's hard to find VBA code to do it. I'm sure I have posted some previously though.

One issue is that to download a PDF, you collect a string of bytes. But the trouble I found and I couldn't solve it is that access changes a string of bytes into unicode characters, and then the PDF becomes unreasonable. I couldn't get a readable PDF in VBA

 

[tvanstiphout]

I don't know anything about authentication with Amazon, but I would be very surprised if this would not work:
Tim Hall - https://github.com/VBA-tools/VBA-Web
The code supports multiple authentication methods.

 

[theDBguy]

One issue is that to download a PDF, you collect a string of bytes. But the trouble I found and I couldn't solve it is that access changes a string of bytes into unicode characters, and then the PDF becomes unreasonable. I couldn't get a readable PDF in VBA

It's been a while but I thought I tested this function with PDFs and it worked.

Download a File from the Internet

To download a file from the Internet, one option is to use the URLDownloadToFile API, which looks something like this. #If VBA7 Then Priv...

thedbguy.blogspot.com

 

[gemma-the-husky]

@theDBguy
I'm sure I used code very like you showed but I couldn't get it to work. I might not be able to access the Rest API I was using previously, but I might try again and see if it does work.

Perhaps the line of code starting with Put avoids the array of bytes being turned into a unicode text string.

 

[sonic8]

But the trouble I found and I couldn't solve it is that access changes a string of bytes into unicode characters

When would that happen?
If you define the data as an array of bytes, I don't see why it would change to a different data type without you doing it in your code.

 

[theDBguy]

@theDBguy
I'm sure I used code very like you showed but I couldn't get it to work. I might not be able to access the Rest API I was using previously, but I might try again and see if it does work.

Perhaps the line of code starting with Put avoids the array of bytes being turned into a unicode text string.

I would appreciate it if you could let us know what happens, so I can update the article. Cheers!

 

[CJ_London]

Many thanks for the responses.

Further research - there are three 'methods' of connecting to Amazon, depending on your type of account - Marketplace (selling), Business (buying) and web services. I need Business and the link I provided was to do with Marketplace so has to be discounted as a way forward.

I asked ChatGPT who advised there is no such API for Business which is where I need to be. However within Amazon, Business offers a link to Business Analytics and I can download from there (manually at least) - it downloads a zip file with all the current month (or whatever time period you provide) invoices as pdf's. In the short term this will work for me, and I might be able to use python or javascript to automate further - ideally downloads need to be daily but can live with weekly. The potential problem is Amazon can be quite changeable so any automated process could fail at any time.