Overview

Amazon's Event Notification Web Service provides sellers and developers with a structured way to retrieve account activity notifications through the Selling Partner API ecosystem. This reference covers two foundational concepts — Events and NextToken pagination — that underpin how applications consume notification data from Amazon's systems. Understanding these mechanisms is essential for any developer building integrations that track order activity, payment disbursements, or customer claims.

Key Points / What Sellers Need to Know

• Events represent account activities — An Event is any significant action on your seller account, such as a new order being placed, funds being disbursed to your bank account, or a customer filing an A-to-z Guarantee claim.
• NextToken enables paginated retrieval — When your application requests events, Amazon returns them in pages rather than all at once. A NextToken acts as a bookmark that saves your place in the sequence, preventing missed or duplicated events.
• TimeToLive sets token expiration — Each NextToken has a limited lifespan defined by its TimeToLive field. If you don't use the token before this window expires, it becomes invalid and you'll need to start a new retrieval sequence.
• OffsetTime enforces rate limiting — The OffsetTime field specifies a mandatory wait period before a NextToken can be used. This throttling mechanism ensures fair access to the service across all API consumers.
• Pagination prevents data loss — By properly handling NextToken values, your application can process large volumes of events across multiple requests without missing notifications or creating duplicates.

How Events Work

Events are the core data units within Amazon's notification system. Each Event corresponds to a discrete account activity that Amazon records and makes available through the API. Common event types include order placement notifications that fire when a customer purchases one of your products, disbursement events that signal when Amazon transfers funds to your designated bank account, and claim events triggered when a buyer files a complaint or A-to-z Guarantee request. These events are queued chronologically and made available for retrieval through paginated API calls. Developers building seller tools, accounting integrations, or order management systems rely on these events to keep external systems synchronized with the seller's Amazon account activity.