Power Query and Amazon Sales Data

[Antman79]

Hi All

I am very very new to Power Query - thanks @Ken Puls for the introduction to it at the Unlock Excel conference in Brisbane.

As im very new, i don't know much of what im doing however i wanted to start to see if Amazon sales data could be obtained using Power Query.
I have logins for https://kdp.amazon.com/ . I can access the data using the web URL process of obtaining data however this is really no better than exporting from amazon to excel and then placing into excel.

So i was wondering if anyone knows if its possible to link to the amazon database directly to get the data?

Thanks so much

Ants

 

[Ken Puls]

Hi Ants,

So I'm not familiar with the back end of the Amazon UI, but generally if there is a logon between us and the pages, we're in trouble. This is another area where work still needs to be done by the PQ team, unfortunately.

You MAY be able to get past it by building the URL to the page you need. If you get it right, the security dialog will pop up asking for your username and password, and this is the key. If you can make one of the given methods work, then you're golden. If not though, you're back to a manual download of the data file and throwing it in a folder. (It's the security prompt that is the issue usually, although it depends on whether amazon is surfacing that data page as javascript or not.)

For what it's worth, I prefer to download data files such as CSV rather than relying on the web page. Reason is that then I get to pull my data down offline, and if Amazon changes the structure of the page then I'm not getting hit with that change (and a query adjustment/re-write) in order to get it to work.

 

[Antman79]

Hey Ken

Thanks so much. I was assuming it would be problematic. I will get the raw data in excel and create the query to bring the data in.
Cheers again.
Ants