Who should read this?

If you upload feeds or download reports using Amazon SOAP or AIM APIs, this announcement may be applicable to you. Feeds include product, inventory and price uploads; downloads include order and settlement reports.

The ID returned for feeds and reports by Amazon SOAP and AIM servers will soon exceed maximum for signed 32 bit integer. Customer action may be needed.

What is happening?

Merchants selling on Amazon.com can upload feeds and download reports using SOAP APIs, AIM API’s or Seller Central. When a feed is uploaded, Amazon returns a unique ID that identifies the feed that is submitted. Similarly, for report requests, Amazon returns a unique ID that identifies the report. In the near future (10-12 weeks), we expect the ID returned by Amazon SOAP/AIM APIs to be greater than 2147483647 (i.e., the number that can fit in 32 bits).

Since the growth in IDs is based on system usage, we cannot provide an exact date when the numbers will overflow 32 bits. Based on the system usage, we can predict that this will happen sometime in the next 10-12 weeks. Any customer using this ID internally for sequencing will have to ensure that they can handle numbers greater than what can fit in 32 bits.

Technical Details

A documentTransactionID (also referred to as batch id) is generated and returned by Amazon SOAP and AIM servers for feed uploads; a ReportID is returned for report queries. Both of these IDs will soon exceed the largest value a signed 32 bit integer can hold. The mathematical value of this threshold is 2^31 – 1(decimal 2,147,483,647).

Any SOAP/AIM server client using the documentTransactionID or ReportID should check that their software can handle IDs larger than 2^31. Amazon recommends using either character strings or integer types at least 64 bits in size to store the IDs returned by Amazon servers. This change should be made within the next 12 weeks, at the latest.

If the ID is not handled correctly on the client side the client may store an incorrect value for the ID. Without the correct ID value the client will be unable to check the status of any feeds uploaded or report downloads requested.