Amazon records dates in Coordinated Universal Time or UTC. UTC is the primary standard used to regulate clocks and time by the world and is not adjusted for daylight saving time. Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is the predecessor to UTC and effectively means the same as UTC. For those familiar with Zulu time, it is the military name for UTC.
All dates found in Amazon data files are store in UTC format. They resemble the following format 2022-02-21T09:33:23.376Z. There are a variety of formats to represent UTC. By default, UTC uses the 24-hour clock, but a 12-hour clock can be used by modifying the format to include AM/PM.
When Amazon provides a date like the following 2022-02-21T09:33:23.376Z in one of their data files it is translated as follows:
- UTC – 0: 2/21/2022 9:33:23 AM
- UTC – 5: 2/21/2022 4:33:23 AM EST
- UTC – 6: 2/21/2022 3:33:23 AM CST
- UTC – 7: 2/21/2022 2:33:23 AM MST
- UTC – 8: 2/21/2022 1:33:23 AM PST
Here is a simple example of what all this means. Let’s say you purchase an item from Amazon at 1:00 PM EST. Amazon will report the orders was purchased at 6:00 PM UTC which is the same as 12:00 PM CST, 11:00 AM MST, and 10: AM PST when applying the UTC offsets for each time zone.
Though we are discussing Amazon in this article, UTC format rules applies to all marketplaces that use this format to report date values.
For more information on UTC and ISO 8601, check out the following Wikipedia article.
Are you ready to automate your workflows to gain maximum productivity? Take a look at one of our recent projects to learn more about how we can help with your business automation, 3rd party integrations, and reporting, contact us.
We hope this post has been helpful. Any questions or comments, please feel free to post.