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 https //docs trajectdata com/rainforestapi/product data api/parameters/category , https //docs trajectdata com/rainforestapi/product data api/parameters/category , https //docs trajectdata com/rainforestapi/product data api/parameters/deals and 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 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 https //docs trajectdata com/rainforestapi/product data api/parameters/category , https //docs trajectdata com/rainforestapi/product data api/parameters/category , https //docs trajectdata com/rainforestapi/product data api/parameters/deals and 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 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 https //amazon com au/ amazon com au false true true https //amazon com be/ amazon com be false true true https //amazon com br/ amazon com br false true true https //amazon ca/ amazon ca false true true https //amazon cn/ amazon cn false true true https //amazon eg/ amazon eg false true true https //amazon fr/ amazon fr true true true https //amazon de/ amazon de true true true https //amazon in/ amazon in true true true https //amazon it/ amazon it true true true https //amazon co jp/ amazon co jp false true true https //amazon com mx/ amazon com mx false true true https //amazon nl/ amazon nl false true true https //amazon pl/ amazon pl false true true https //amazon sa/ amazon sa false true true https //amazon sg/ amazon sg false true true https //amazon es/ amazon es true true true https //amazon se/ amazon se false true true https //amazon com tr/ amazon com tr false true true https //amazon ae/ amazon ae false true true https //amazon co uk/ amazon co uk true true true https //amazon com/ amazon com true true true next steps https //docs trajectdata com/rainforestapi/categories api/list and search