title: How to switch to Amazon MWS from AIM?
body: <p>I recently discovered that Amazon will be gradually shifting to their MWS system soon, and that if I want to incorporate all of our European Amazon accounts into one marketplace, I will need to be using MWS to upload our store inventory to the account.</p>
  
  <p>However, our current solution is merely a cURL .sh script that runs every hour on a crontab on our Linux machine. It simply sends the inventory as a flat file to our Amazon account, similar to the following:</p>
  
  <pre><code>curl 
      --header 'Authorization: Basic [omitted authentication info]' 
      --verbose 
      --request POST 
      --upload-file /home/websync/amazon/rhamuk.txt 
      --cookie "x-main=YvjPkwfntqDKun0QEmVRPcTTZDMe?Tn?; 
              ubid-main=002-8989859-9917520; 
              ubid-tacbus=019-5423258-4241018;
              x-tacbus=vtm4d53DvX@Sc9LxTnAnxsFL3DorwxJa; 
              ubid-tcmacb=087-8055947-0795529; 
              ubid-ty2kacbus=161-5477122-2773524; 
              session-id=087-178254-5924832; 
              session-id-time=950660664" 
      --header "Content-Type: text/xml" 
      --header "UploadFor: Marketplace" 
      --header "FileFormat: TabDelimited"   
      https://secure.amazon.co.uk/exec/panama/seller-admin/catalog-upload/add-modify-delete
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>MWS provids C#, Java, and PHP libraries for example solutions to using MWS, but I am only most familiar with Perl. I have given a user-developed Perl library a try but am still lost.</p>
  
  <p>I guess I do not understand how it can go from being so simple as using cURL to upload the file with all authentication info and parameters, to such a complex system as MWS seems to be.</p>
  
  <p>Where do I start? I have tried using AMTU2 (a program that integrates with MWS for you) but sadly it does not contain a feature to purge-replace the inventory that already exists on Amazon, which we need to do on occasion if there is some wrong items listed for whatever reason (usually an in-store crash of our database).</p>
  
  <p>Is there no simple script that I can run on my linux machine every hour through its crontab that will upload our inventory flat file to Amazon?</p>