Overview

categories api overview amazon has a huge product hierachy and to make navigating this easier rainforest api provides the categories api to allow you to retrieve category id values for different levels of the amazon hierarchy category id values returned by the categories api can be used in subsequent category https //docs trajectdata com/rainforestapi/product data api/parameters/category , search https //docs trajectdata com/rainforestapi/product data api/parameters/category , deals https //docs trajectdata com/rainforestapi/product data api/parameters/deals and bestsellers https //docs trajectdata com/rainforestapi/product data api/parameters/bestsellers api requests to limit the category listings, search results, deals results or bestsellers results returned to just products in a given category this is useful for use cases such as "iterating all of the products in a category", or "showing search results within a specific category" listing the contents of a category it's a common use case to want to iterate through the contents of a category to retrieve all products note that pagination using type=category or type=search for top level (i e is root=true ) categories is not supported by the amazon sites if you wish to iterate the contents of a category the recommended approach is to pick the lowest level categories to perform your iteration / pagination on whilst most of the time the category id 's returned by the categories api are "static", it's expected that amazon's category hierarchy will change over time rainforest api continuously updates the categories api dataset to capture these changes it's advised that, if your code relies on showing the category hierarchy to users, you periodically refresh your cached hierarchy from the categories api categories api cost & rate limits each request to the categories api counts against your monthly request quota so it's recommended that you cache the categories api response locally and use your local copy for lookups within your app the categories api has a rate limit of 2000 requests per minute as well as interacting with the categories api programmatically rainforest api provides a visual categories browser https //app rainforestapi com/categories on the dashboard, as shown below you can use this to visually explore the amazon hierarchy for a given amazon domain and generate sample category https //docs trajectdata com/rainforestapi/product data api/parameters/category , search https //docs trajectdata com/rainforestapi/product data api/parameters/category , deals https //docs trajectdata com/rainforestapi/product data api/parameters/deals and bestsellers https //docs trajectdata com/rainforestapi/product data api/parameters/category api requests you can browse the category hierarchy for a given amazon domain visually using the categories browser https //app rainforestapi com/categories the categories api can return amazon standard categories (for use with type=category and type=search requests), bestseller categories (for use with type=bestsellers requests) and deals categories (for use with type=deals requests) availability of standard, bestsellers and deals categories, per amazon domain, is shown below country value standard categories bestsellers categories deals categories australia amazon com au false true true belgium amazon com be false true true brazil amazon com br false true true canada amazon ca false true true china amazon cn false true true egypt amazon eg false true true france amazon fr true true true germany amazon de true true true india amazon in true true true italy amazon it true true true japan amazon co jp false true true mexico amazon com mx false true true netherlands amazon nl false true true poland amazon pl false true true saudi arabia amazon sa false true true singapore amazon sg false true true spain amazon es true true true sweden amazon se false true true turkey amazon com tr false true true uae amazon ae false true true united kingdom amazon co uk true true true united states amazon com true true true next steps listing & searching categories https //docs trajectdata com/rainforestapi/categories api/list and search