Amazon

If you sell on Amazon, your customers can contact you through Amazon's Buyer-Seller Messaging Service — and those messages can flow into Octocom like any other support ticket. This page explains how the channel works, how to get the messages into Octocom, whether the AI can respond, and how far you can take automation with Amazon's APIs.

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How Amazon support works

Amazon deliberately keeps buyers and sellers at arm's length. When a customer contacts a seller, Amazon does not share the customer's real email address. Instead:

1. The buyer writes a message through Amazon (from the order page or your storefront).
2. Amazon forwards it as an email to the customer service address configured in your Seller Central account. The sender is an anonymized relay address like [email protected], unique to that buyer-seller relationship.
3. You reply to that relay address by email, and Amazon delivers your reply to the buyer's Amazon account (and their real inbox).

This email relay is the only channel Amazon offers for buyer-seller communication. There is no API for reading buyer messages — even dedicated marketplace help desk tools work exactly this way, over email. That's good news: it means connecting Amazon to Octocom requires no special integration.

Does Amazon have live chat?

No — not with sellers. The live chat buyers see on Amazon is Amazon's own customer service, and it only handles marketplace-side issues (Prime, payments, deliveries, FBA returns). When a buyer's issue concerns your products or your store, Amazon's chat directs them to "contact the seller", which goes through Buyer-Seller Messaging — the same emails described above. So once the email flow is connected, everything a customer can send you through Amazon is covered.

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Getting Amazon messages into Octocom

Because Amazon delivers buyer messages by email, the setup happens entirely in Seller Central — you point Amazon at an email address that's already connected to Octocom.

1. Route buyer messages to your connected inbox. In Seller Central, open Settings → Notification Preferences → Messaging and set the Buyer Messages notification email to the address connected to Octocom (e.g. [email protected]). Make sure all buyer message types are routed there — if some types go to a different address, those tickets won't reach Octocom.
2. Authorize outbound replies. In Settings → Fulfillment by Amazon → Buyer-Seller Messaging (or Messaging Permissions, depending on your account), add the same address as an Approved Sender. Amazon silently drops replies from addresses that aren't approved — the email will appear to send, but the buyer never receives it. This step is easy to miss and is the most common cause of "our replies aren't getting through".

Once both are in place, every Amazon inquiry becomes a normal Octocom conversation: it lands in the inbox, can be tagged, assigned, answered by an agent or by the AI, and your replies are relayed back to the buyer by Amazon.

Tip: Amazon usually includes the order ID in the subject line (e.g. "Product details inquiry from Amazon customer Alex (Order: 112-0624927-4792268)"). Agents can use it to look the order up in Seller Central — and the AI can use it too, if you connect order data (see below).

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Can the AI respond to Amazon messages?

Yes. Amazon conversations are regular email conversations in Octocom, so the same choice you make for email in general applies here: route everything to human agents, or let the AI handle what it can. Many merchants start with human-only handling and enable AI responses once order data is connected.

If you enable AI responses for Amazon traffic, a few Amazon-specific rules matter:

• No links or marketing. Amazon's messaging policy prohibits promotional content, review solicitation, and links to external websites in buyer-seller messages. Messages that violate the policy can be blocked and count against your account. Your bot's instructions should reflect this — your account manager can help set up an Amazon-appropriate response style.
• 24-hour response SLA. Amazon expects sellers to respond to buyer messages within 24 hours, including weekends and holidays, and tracks this in your account health. An AI that responds instantly is a natural fit here.
• Anonymized customers. The buyer's email is a relay address, so the AI can't match the customer to your store data by email. Order lookups work through the order ID instead — usually available right in the subject line.

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Connecting Amazon order data

Out of the box, Octocom doesn't have access to your Amazon orders — Amazon orders live in Seller Central, not in your e-commerce platform. Without order data the AI can still answer product and policy questions, but anything order-specific ("where is my order?", "was I refunded?") needs a connection to Amazon's Selling Partner API (SP-API).

The good news: for accessing your own selling account, this is much simpler than it sounds.

Getting API access

Amazon lets sellers create a private, self-authorized application — an API credential that can only access your own account, with no app review process:

1. In Seller Central, register as a private developer (requires a Professional selling account; approval typically takes a day or two).
2. Create a private application in the Developer Console.
3. Self-authorize it — this generates a long-lived refresh token.
4. That refresh token, together with the app's client credentials, is everything needed to call the SP-API.

With those credentials, Octocom can pull order data through custom actions — for example a Python action that takes an order ID and returns the order status, items, and shipping progress for the AI to use in its answer.

You don't need to build this yourself. The Octocom Copilot or an MCP agent can help you set up the actions, or your account manager can arrange it — and if you prefer, your own IT team can do it using the credentials above.

What data is available

• Standard order data — status, items, totals, fulfillment channel, ship dates — is available with no special permissions. This covers the large majority of support questions.
• Buyer personal data — name, shipping address, contact details — is restricted. Accessing it requires Amazon's restricted data roles and a data protection audit, which takes weeks and imposes ongoing security obligations. For support automation it's rarely needed, and we recommend skipping it.

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Refunds and cancellations

Whether you need (or can have) refund and cancellation automation depends on who fulfills your orders:

FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon)

You don't need it. Amazon handles the entire post-purchase money flow for FBA orders itself: it auto-approves return requests within the return window, sends the buyer a prepaid label, receives the item, and issues the refund — all without seller involvement. Cancellation requests are likewise handled by Amazon. Your support (human or AI) only needs to answer informational questions; when a buyer asks for a refund on an FBA order, the right answer is to point them to Amazon's return process, and the AI can be instructed to do exactly that.

FBM (Fulfilled by Merchant)

It's possible. For seller-fulfilled orders, refunds and cancellations are your responsibility, and both can be automated through the SP-API:

• Refunds are issued programmatically via Amazon's Feeds API (the payment adjustment feed).
• Cancellations of unshipped orders go through the order acknowledgement feed.

These are asynchronous feed submissions rather than simple API calls, so they're a natural fit for Python actions with appropriate guardrails — for example, only allowing the AI to refund within limits you define, or requiring human approval before the action runs. If you're an FBM seller and want this, talk to your account manager and we'll scope it with you.

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Summary