Amazon No API
Experiencing API access issues with Amazon? You can still keep your site running smoothly.
Content Egg includes a built-in Amazon NoAPI module, which lets you continue adding product blocks and importing items without active API access.
Update — 30 November 2025:
If you go to your Amazon affiliate dashboard → Tools → Product Advertising API, you will now see this statement:
How do I get access to PA API?
Once your account is approved as an Associates account, you will see a ‘Request for PA API access’ button below and you can click the button to generate PA API credentials. However, in order to gain PA API access and maintain the ability to call PA API, you must generate 10 qualified sales in the trailing 30 days.
However, some important details remain unclear — for instance whether “qualified sales” are counted as individual items shipped, or as completed orders, and whether those sales must be specifically attributed to PA-API 5 activity. We’re investigating — and welcome any insight or experiences in the comments below.
Update — 16 November 2025:
Amazon has still not issued any official statement, but I’ve now received dozens of independent confirmations from users. It’s clear that Amazon is enforcing a new rule: you must generate 10 qualified orders in the last 30 days to keep PA-API access active (previously only one order was needed). This appears to affect all locales.
Yesterday, a Content Egg user reached out with a strange new Amazon API error:
“AssociateNotEligible (403) – Your account does not currently meet the eligibility requirements to access the Product Advertising API.”
That’s new. I’d never seen it before — and it immediately raised some eyebrows.
What’s Going On?
Naturally, I checked Amazon’s official documentation. Here’s what it says now:
“This error occurs when the account associated with the access key fails to meet the eligibility requirements for accessing the Product Advertising API. The current eligibility criteria to access the Product Advertising API is that the account must have made 10 qualified sales in the trailing 30 days.”
Wait, 10 sales? 😳
That’s a big jump! It used to be just 1 sale to stay eligible.
Confusing and Inconsistent Info
Here’s the strange part — this “10 sales” rule doesn’t appear anywhere else in the usual Amazon documentation.
For example, Amazon’s API Usage and Rate Limits page still says:
“Note that your account will lose access to Product Advertising API 5.0 if it has not generated qualified referring sales for a consecutive 30-day period.”
That’s the old rule, referring to “some sales” (not specifically 10).
And normally, when that happens, the error you’d get is TooManyRequests (throttling), not AssociateNotEligible.
Even more curious — there hasn’t been any official announcement about this change.
But I checked the documentation history with the Wayback Machine, and sure enough, this new error message was added recently.
Reports from the Community
The only other mention I found was from a Japanese social media post, where someone shared a response from Amazon support:
“As of November 12th, the policy has changed. You must have 10 qualifying sales within the past 30 days to access the PA API.”
That lines up perfectly with what we’re seeing.
Why the Change?
Honestly, it fits with Amazon’s broader trend — tightening API and affiliate access, trimming smaller partners, and focusing on higher-volume affiliates.
For many smaller sites or new affiliates, this new 10-sales threshold could be a serious barrier.
What We Know So Far
Here’s the current picture:
- A new API error: “AssociateNotEligible”
- The error points to new eligibility rules (10 sales in 30 days)
- The change isn’t reflected in all documentation yet
- It’s unclear if this affects all locales or just specific regions/accounts
We’re reaching out to Amazon for official clarification and will update this post as soon as we get confirmation.
With 20 years in affiliate marketing, Serge creates practical WordPress tools such as Content Egg and External Importer that help publishers manage and grow their affiliate sites.
Thank you for sharing this. I’ve only just discovered it in the last couple of days and couldn’t work out what the issue was. It’s crazy that Amazon has done this without warning at the busiest time of the year. It shows complete disrespect for Associates.
I know, the sudden change surprised a lot of us. Amazon really should’ve communicated it better, especially during peak season. What do you plan to do next – stick with API or look for alternatives?
yes I just hit this error
How do I get access to PA API?
In order to qualify for requesting access to PA API, you will need an approved Associates account and you will have to comply with the Operating Agreement. Once your account is approved as an Associates account, you will see a ‘Request for PA API access’ button below and you can click the button to generate PA API credentials. However, in order to gain PA API access and maintain the ability to call PA API, you must generate 10 qualified sales in the trailing 30 days.
Make 3 sales → get Associates approval → request PA-API access → maintain 10 sales every 30 days to keep it active.
Do you guys know if it is 10 sales in a specific country or 10 sales overall ?
It’s 10 qualified sales per locale, not overall. Each Amazon marketplace (US, UK, DE, etc.) requires its own 10 sales within the last 30 days to stay eligible for PA-API.
It’s doing my head in. I have access to the api in UK, Germany, France, Spain and Italy, but Amazon are applying the rules differently.
Customer service told me – “The Error Code “AssociateNotEligible” occurs when the account associated with the access key does not meet the eligibility requirements to access the Product Advertising API. The current eligibility criteria for accessing the Product Advertising API is that the account has made 10 qualifying sales in the last 30 days.”
I have shipped sales for the following:
UK – 27
Germany – 20
France – 18
Spain- 22
Italy – 20
But I still don’t have access for Spain and Italy. Originally I had less than 10 items shipped for France, Spain and Italy at the time of the changes, and none of them worked.
Then Amazon told me that it wasn’t the amount of items, but the number of transactions.
I have the following number of transactions:
UK- 15
Germany – 9
France – 5
Spain – 3
Italy – 4
So only UK would now qualify according to Customer Service, but that’s not true either….
It’s a complete s**t show and there’s no way of finding out what the correct answer is.
Thanks for sharing your experience — and you’re right, the whole situation is a mess at the moment.
Just to clarify: Amazon does not show anything called “transactions” in the Associates reports. There’s no such column. Support sometimes uses “transactions” to mean orders, but the dashboard only shows items, not order counts — so there’s no way for us to verify that number ourselves.
From everything I’ve seen, “qualifying sales” seems to refer to Shipped Items, meaning:
– 1 order with 1 item → 1 sale
– 1 order with 5 items → 5 sales
– 3 orders with 2 items each → 6 sales
A few things you might check on your side:
– Look at Link Type Performance to confirm your sales are attributed to PA-API links. Amazon stresses attribution a lot in the API rate-limit documentation.
– Check whether any items were returned, which might affect eligibility.
– Remember that after an item ships, it can take up to 48 hours before Amazon counts it as a qualifying sale.
You’re definitely not alone — Amazon has made this extremely confusing. If you can share what you see in the attribution report and whether it matches your API access for each locale, it might help others understand what’s going on.
You’re right, there’s no such thing as transactions, which makes Amazon’s advice completely impossible to monitor. I simply took day where orders were made to mean transactions, but there’s no way of me knowing if it was 1 or more transactions on any given day if multiple items were ordered.
Under the earnings tab, I have the following number of items ordered as attributed revenue with advertising fees.
UK – 41
DE – 20
FR – 18
ES – 22
IT – 26
These numbers take into account known returns
Link type performance attribution:
UK – 61 ordered – 41 dispatched
DE – 23 ordered – 20 dispatched
FR – 19 ordered – 19 dispatched
ES – 28 ordered – 22 dispatched
IT – 26 ordered – 24 dispatched
.This doesn’t make sense given that Amazon ES and IT still aren’t working. The only thing which I’m curious about is that both ES and IT have only a bit over €100 shipped items revenue each, but the others have significantly more. So there must have been a lower average value to each item bought on Amazon ES and IT. I’m not aware of a minimum average value limit for the programme.
I’ve not noticed this being an issue previously, and value of recent sales is still significantly higher than it has been some previous months.
In the Link Type Performance report you can break down Items Shipped by link source:
– Others
– PA-API
– PA-API 5
My suggestion is to check specifically how many shipped items are attributed to PA-API 5.
It might be that Amazon only counts sales attributed to PA-API 5 toward current API eligibility.
This isn’t confirmed, but it could explain why some locales appear to meet the shipped-item numbers overall yet still don’t qualify for API access.
That might make sense, but that also leaves a flaw. How would sites be able to qualify for adequate sales if API access is denied? It would have to include product links too.
At present, all my sites are working correctly, but I did have to keep chasing Customer Support, as it still didn’t work even though there appeared to be enough qualifying orders made.
Does the returned items removed from the calculations? for example: I got 6 sales with 1 item each so there are 6 qualified sales. But, 5 of them were returned. Does it means that 1 sale is qualified?
Yes – returned items are removed from the “qualified sales” count.
I’ve been chasing this as well. I literally gained access on the morning this policy changed, and a few hours later started getting the error message above. I’ve gone back and forth with support a few times. at first they told me 10 sales. Then once I got there, they told me it was “10 individual people ordering products”
I’m almost certain I’ve reached that threshold at this point, but i have zero insight or ways to check.
You’re definitely not alone. I support a lot of people with my WordPress plugin that integrates the Amazon API, and I see new cases of this every day. I still have no idea how Amazon actually counts “sales” for that 10-sale threshold – their support answers are all over the place and usually just make things more confusing.
And the fact that they didn’t even give you another 30 days and cut off your access right after you created the key… is really frustrating.
Agreed. I just emailed again for more clarity, which I’ll probably regret.
I am just starting and somewhat confused. I had API access in the past. I had some info pulled in from API. I have moved my hosting and now in the process of building another version of site. I have Amazon plug in now and that’s how I discovered it does not work anymore. I can see that nothing I can do at this moment, bc I am not generating any sales or not enough. When I go to my old website the info is still there on the products I used API. Am I out of compliance bc the info is not updating now for example to the latest price or latest description? The whole thing is c**.
It’s better to hide Amazon prices if you don’t have API access and cannot update prices every 24 hours.