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Amazon Marketplace Web Service (Amazon MWS) Documentation

Deprecation Notice:

Amazon Marketplace Web Service (MWS) will no longer be available after March 31, 2024. All MWS developers must migrate to Selling Partner API (SP-API) to avoid service disruptions. Refer to the Migration Hub for more information.

Amazon MWS Documentation

ISO 8859-1 use in Amazon MWS

Amazon Marketplace Web Service (Amazon MWS) uses character encoding based on ISO 8859-1. This section will clarify just how you should format and use character encoding in Amazon MWS.

ISO/IEC 8859-1

ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1, is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings. It is generally intended for Western European languages. It is the basis for the most popular 8-bit character sets, including Windows-1252 and the first block of characters in Unicode. The HTML 2.0 standard defined its document character set as ISO 8859-1. HTML5 has changed this to Unicode character encoding (ISO/IEC 10646, Information technology — Universal Coded Character Set (UCS)). Since the first block of unicode characters is essentially the same as ISO 8859-1, compatability is maintained.

Prior to the introduction of Unicode, ISO/IEC 8859-1 was used as the basis of other encodings and has several aliases. For example, iso-ir-100, csISOLatin1, latin1, l1, IBM819, CP819, and others. The safe practice is to conform to ISO 8859-1 when using Amazon MWS.