Getting Started

Setting Up The Sandbox

django-oscar-mws comes with a sandbox site that shows how MWS can be integrated with Oscar. It resembles a basic set up of Oscar with an out-of-the-box integration of MWS. This section will walk you through setting the sandbox up locally and how to make it interact with the MWS API.

Note

Oscar itself has quite a few dependencies and settings that might cause some problems when you are setting up the MWS sandbox. In addition to this documentation you might also want to check out the Oscar docs on setting up a project.

The first thing to do is cloning the repository and installing it’s requirements which will includes setting up Oscar. It also creates a new database (if it doesn’t exist) creates the required tables:

$ git clone git@github.com:tangentlabs/django-oscar-mws.git
$ cd django-oscar-mws
$ mkvirtualenv mws  # requires virtualenvwrapper to be installed
$ make sandbox

By default, the sandbox is using Oscar’s precompiled CSS files by setting USE_LESS = False. If you want to use LESS to generate the CSS yourself, take a look at the documentation on how to use LESS with Oscar.

Create Admin User

The main interface for MWS lives in Oscar’s dashboard and therefore requires an admin user to login. Create a new admin account using Django’s createsuperuser command and follow the instruction:

$ ./sandbox/manage.py createsuperuser

You should now be able to run the sandbox locally using Django’s builtin HTTP server:

$ ./sandbox/manage.py runserver

You now have a sample shop up and running and should be able to navigate to the dashboard to continue the setup of your MWS credentials.

Stock Records and MWS

As described in Concepts, integration Oscar’s stock records with MWS requires a little additional setup. Oscar assumes that it handles the allocation and consumption of stock through the stock record(s) for a product. With MWS the available stock is actually dictated by Amazon and can’t be handled the Oscar way. Therefore, a few extra methods on the stock record are required which are encapsulated in the AmazonStockTrackingMixin.

Making these methods available to OMWS requires you to override the partner app in Oscar. Check the documentation on how to customise Oscar apps to get a more comprehensive introduction. The short version is, you need to create a new app in your project called partner and create a models.py module in it. Import all the models from the core Oscar app and add the AmazonStockTrackingMixin to the StockRecord model similar to this:

from oscar.apps.address.abstract_models import AbstractPartnerAddress
from oscar.apps.partner.abstract_models import *

from oscar_mws.mixins import AmazonStockTrackingMixin


class StockRecord(AmazonStockTrackingMixin, AbstractStockRecord):
    pass


class Partner(AbstractPartner):
    pass


class PartnerAddress(AbstractPartnerAddress):
    pass


class StockAlert(AbstractStockAlert):
    pass

And then add the partner app to your INSTALLED_APPS like this:

from oscar.core import get_core_apps

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
] + get_core_apps(['myproject.partner'])

This setup provides you with a default implementation that disables updating the consumed stock on a MWS-enabled stock record and provides methods to update stock from MWS when retrieved from Amazon.

Note

The AmazonStockTrackingMixin provides a basic implementation for MWS-enabled stock. If you are using multiple different types of fulfillment partners this implementation might not be sufficient and you’ll have to adjust the implemenation to your specific use cases.

Setting Up MWS

The API endpoints provided by Amazon MWS differ based on the MWS region. The different regions and endpoints are detailed in the Amazon docs. Each region requires separate MWS credentials for each account. In OMWS, these accounts are called merchant accounts and are used to identify the endpoints to use when communication with MWS.

You have to create a merchant account and provide your MWS credentials to be able to connect to MWS. Head to the Amazon MWS > Merchants & Marketplaces in the Oscar dashboard and select ‘Add merchant account’. A corresponding partner account in Oscar is required for a MWS merchant account, however, if no partner is selected explicitly, a new one will be created automatically with the same name as the MWS merchant account.

With your merchant account(s) added, you can update the corresponding marketplaces in the drop-down menu on the right-hand side. This will pull the MWS marketplaces that you are able to trade in from MWS. This will also indicate that communicating with the MWS API is successful.