title: Amazon-MWS: Difference between Reports and Order lists
body: <p>I'm trying to integrate the orders from Amazon Marketplace into our system. I did that before with Magento and thought this should be easy as that, but somehow I got stuck.</p>
  
  <p>I downloaded the Java APIs from <a href="https://developer.amazonservices.com/index.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Amazon</a> and started playing around with the examples.<br>
  So far so good - I was able to get them running. 
  But playing with the <a href="https://developer.amazonservices.com/gp/mws/api.html/192-9087225-9522840?ie=UTF8&amp;group=bde&amp;section=reports&amp;version=latest" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Reports API</a> and the <a href="https://developer.amazonservices.com/gp/mws/api.html/192-9087225-9522840?ie=UTF8&amp;group=orders&amp;section=orders&amp;version=latest" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Orders API</a>, I started to wonder which one to use if I only want to get the unshipped orders to put them into our system.<br><br>
  1. doing this with the Report API seems very complicated and involves a lot of calls to the MWS. This is documented by Amazon <a href="http://docs.developer.amazonservices.com/en_US/reports/Reports_Overview.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a>.<br>
  2. using the Orders API seems pretty straightforward. I only have to create a <code>ListOrdersRequest</code>, define what type of orders I want to have and finally get them via a <code>ListOrders</code> call.<br><br>
  So my question is: <strong>What is the reason to choose the Reports API over the Orders API?</strong></p>
  
  <p>Seems like Amazon is recommending the Reports API, but I really do not understand why this should be so complicated. Why should I get Reports when I can get the Orders directly?</p>