The good new is… Automated Notification of Sales (ANS) rolled out yesterday for Direct Delivery. ANS allows information on sales to be forwarded to an external URL, allowing merchants to not only track sales, but to perform a range of different analyses on their sales and customers, in order to provide things like more focused support, identify product trends and so on.
Originally, it had been hoped that ANS would form part-and-parcel of the overall Direct Delivery roll-out, and many merchants were disappointed that this was not the case, with ANS being delayed for reasons unknown.
Yesterday’s announcement that ANS is now available came with a highly-informative user-written wiki article on how to make use of ANS. This is extremely well-presented and spells-out exactly how ANS data can be received and used.
However, it’s not all good news, sadly, as Darrius Gothly reports in the forum thread making the announcement:
Sadly the ANS for Direct Delivery has a Severe bug and IS NOT SAFE TO USE YET!! The ANS Transaction being sent via the Marketplace service is duplicating the Item ID# (the numeric part of the Product’s listing page) into the Location field. The Location Field is supposed to have the Order Line Item ID number instead, showing which line item in an Order correlates to the ANS Transaction. As long as that field contains the wrong data, you CANNOT track an ANS transaction back to the specific line item in an Order.
Darrius has raised a JIRA on the matter, and merchants who use ANS / have an interest in using ANS are urged to log-in and WATCH the JIRA.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 
Why does this make ANS “unsafe to use “rather than simply broken?
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Presumably because, as Darrius states, it makes it impossible for a merchant reliant upon ANS to accurately trace an ANS transaction back to a specific item within an order. Ergo, the ability to trace items end-to-end is somewhat buggered, as is (I assume) the ability to further confirm any issues reported / related to items within an order.
The data from ANS isn’t looked at in and of itself, it’s subject to external processing at the merchant’s end of things: as such incorrect data going in is liable to lead to incorrect information coming out, making any reliance on such data “unsafe”.
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