frequently asked questions

General questions.

Do not hesitate for any questions

Can you build feature XYZ?

Probably! Often features are already possible using the Zinc API. If they are not, ZincWorks, our custom development arm, is capable of taking on projects of all sizes in the web automation and e-commerce space.

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How does billing work?

Our pricing starts at $1/order, with the opportunity for volume discounts once you are placing more than 100 orders per month with Zinc. Note that we only charge for successful orders.

How can I view tracking information for orders placed using the API?

We provide tracking information for you when it is made available for certain retailers. Alternatively, you can check tracking numbers for your order on the retailer's website directly.

I'm an eBay seller that ships a lot of items from Amazon. Can I use this software?

Yes, but you probably want our more comprehensive repricing and order automation tool for eBay and Shopify sellers called PriceYak. PriceYak is built on top of the Zinc APIs exactly for your use case.

Can I know the final price of an order, including tax and shipping?

Yes, set "max_price" to 0. This will prevent orders from being placed, but will provide the final price (including shipping, tax, etc.) in the response.

Can I view all of my orders between a certain date range?

Absolutely! Check out our dashboard.

I'm afraid of sending you my credit card and login details. Is your API secure?

Yes. We use industry-grade 256 bit SSL encryption on all API endpoints. Your card number and login details are in memory on the server only for the duration of each request. If you prefer not to pass your credit card details to our API, you can use gift balance to fund the order, or you can inquire about our Managed Accounts option.

Is there a sandbox for testing the API?

No, but there are a few ways you can test the API. First, you can let the order get placed and then cancel it on the retailer's website (which is easy if done shortly after placing the order). Alternatively, you can set the max_price parameter to 0. This will allow the API to get to the very last page of checkout, and return a result that includes the final price components (subtotal, shipping, tax) for that order. This is one of the last error conditions the API checks for, so it is a good way to debug your integration.

Technical Questions

Do not hesitate to contact support with any questions not answered here

The API supports most products, but there are some notable exceptions: digital products (such as e-books), gift cards, Prime Pantry, Amazon Fresh items, and speciality Amazon products (such as the Echo and Kindle) are not supported. Also, products that require local pickup, scheduled delivery, age verification, or any other extra specialty step during checkout may fail. If these products are critical for your use case, please contact us for more information about custom development.
They are not, they are just queued on our end. For each Amazon account, orders are placed one by one, since you can't have more than one shopping cart at a time. For example, each Amazon order takes about 4 minutes to process, so if you submit 10 orders at the same time for the same Amazon account, the last order will take about 40 minutes to process. If you need orders placed faster, consider using multiple retailer accounts.
Internal errors are caused by either an outage on the retailer's side (e.g. Amazon or Walmart are having issues) or a temporary Zinc problem. Internal errors are safe to retry -- we recommend using exponential backoff to place another order if you receive an internal error.
Each Amazon ASIN corresponds to a single variant. Please use our free Google Chrome extension YakPal to look up variants for any product page on Amazon. Simply pass the ASIN to Zinc under product_id.
You can set max_price to an arbitrarily high number, such as 10000000, to avoid getting a max_price_exceeded error.
This is common when placing orders on a new account for the first time, since we are accessing Amazon from a new IP address. See our documentation about Amazon Email Verification.
You need to provide us the the full card because Amazon asks to verify it when shipping to new addresses. Alternative, you can select gift cards as your payment method (and you can use Piranha to both purchase gift cards as well as automatically load them onto your Amazon accounts).
Our algorithm checks at various times based on our knowledge of when tracking becomes available. We post this response via webhook.
All webhook POST bodies are identical to the Order Response object outlined here.
Yes, use basic auth in the webhook URL as detailed by RFC 1738: “https://USERNAME:PASSWORD@some.server.com/webhookpath” where USERNAME and PASSWORD are the basic auth username and password respectively.
Make sure that your server is configured to accept POST requests from any other server. To debug this, we recommend creating a https://requestb.in/ URL, passing that in as your webhook, and looking at what the data that we returns looks like. This will also confirm to you that our webhooks are working properly.
We will retry POSTing the webhook until you return a 200 status code, so make sure you are returning a 200 at your webhook endpoint.

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