Concepts

django-oscar-mws (OMWS) provides a few models that represent data retrieved from or sent to Amazon’s MWS API.

Merchant Account

  • The merchant account represents the overall account for a region such as EU, US.
  • A merchant account has to be linked to a stock record to be able to store stock for a given product in the right place. A merchant has a 1-to-1 relationship to the partner.Partner model.
  • When saving a merchant account without a partner, a partner with name Amazon (<MWS_REGION>) is looked up or created with the merchant’s region corresponding to MWS_REGION. E.g. for a US merchant account this would be Amazon (US).

Stock Records with MWS

Using MWS for fulfillment implies that we are handling physical stock that requires shipping and the tracking of stock. Oscar’s StockRecord model provides all the necessary functionality for this. However, there is a couple of assumptions that we have to make based on the way MWS works.

  1. Stock in MWS is available on the merchant account level which can be mapped to a fulfillment region, e.g. Europe. As a result, we have to handle one stock record per region/seller account which is done by tying a MerchantAccount directly to a Partner. This is automatically taken care of when saving a new merchant account.

  2. Oscar, by default, tracks stock and uses a 2-stage approach for it. The amount of stock is stored in num_in_stock. Whenever a customer successfully places an order for an item, the num_allocated on its stock record is incremented. The actual amount that is available to buy is calculated by subtracting the allocated stock from the number in stock:

    available = stockrecord.num_in_stock - stockrecord.num_allocated

    This makes tracking stock from MWS a little tricky because we can’t just set the num_in_stock value to the supply quantity retrieved from MWS. This would ignore the allocated stock number and result in a wrong number of items available to buy. Resetting num_allocated to zero when updating inventory will cause issues by itself because marking an item as shipped will result in decrementing num_in_stock and num_allocated by the shipped quantity which would also result in wrong stock numbers. We decided for a combined solution by resetting num_allocated to zero when updating stock from MWS and then preventing decrementing stock when it is marked as shipped if the stock record is tracking MWS stock. This functionality is encapsulated in AmazonStockRecordMixin which you should add to your projects StockRecord.