Amazon.com said it is making a change that will affect merchants who upload feeds or download reports using Amazon SOAP or AIM APIs. The ID returned for feeds and reports will soon exceed maximum for signed 32 bit integer, and Amazon.com warned customers they may need to take action. Feeds include product, inventory and price uploads; downloads include order and settlement reports.

When Merchants upload a feed, Amazon returns a unique ID that identifies the feed that is submitted. Similarly, for report requests, Amazon returns a unique ID that identifies the report. In the near future, Amazon expects the ID returned by Amazon SOAP/AIM APIs to be greater than 2147483647 (i.e., the number that can fit in 32 bits).

Since the growth in IDs is based on system usage, the company said it could not provide an exact date when the numbers would overflow 32 bits but predicted it would happen sometime in the next 10-12 weeks. Any customer using IDs internally for sequencing will have to ensure that they can handle numbers greater than what can fit in 32 bits. Without the correct ID value, the client will be unable to check the status of any feeds uploaded or report downloads requested.

Update 7/2/08: A reader points out that, technically, Amazon is not making a change. The ID number increments every time a new document is generated, and when it grows beyond a 32 bit integer, developers storing the ID in a variable need to make sure that the variable type could handle something larger than 32 bit integer.