Amazon Associates Web Services Tips for Associates

To begin using Amazon Associates Web Services directly, you will need to obtain an Amazon Web Services Subscription ID that works for all countries and an Associates ID for each country from which you wish to retrieve Amazon product data. You can obtain your Web Services Subscription ID at the following site:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aws/registration/registration-form.html

You can obtain an Associates ID for each country at the following sites:

• United States: http://www.amazon.com/associates
• Japan: http://www.amazon.co.jp/associates
• United Kingdom: http://www.amazon.co.uk/associates
• Germany: http://www.amazon.de/partner
• France: http://www.amazon.fr/partenaires
• Canada: http://www.amazon.ca/associates

Sample Requests

To see Amazon Associates Web Services in action, you can try two common requests:

- Searching for products using a keyword
- Looking up product information.

Searching for Products by Keyword

You can use the ItemSearch operation to search an entire section of our catalog. Here's a simple URL request to Amazon Associates Web Service that searches for books with the keyword phrase "Da Vinci":

http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService&SubscriptionId=SUBSCRIPTION_ID&AssociateTag=ASSOCIATES_ID&Operation=ItemSearch&Keywords=Da%20Vinci&SearchIndex=Books

This example illustrates another important aspect of Amazon Associates Web Service requests. If you are searching for a phrase, you must replace space characters in the phrase with the three-character sequence "%20". This is known as URL encoding.

The Amazon Associates Web Services documentation in the Amazon Web Services Resource Center contains a table of search index names for each product line.

You can also look in the documentation's Programming Guide to learn how to narrow your search using additional parameters. For example, you could request books that match the keyword "Da Vinci" with the author "Dan Brown" by adding the author parameter to your request:

http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService&SubscriptionId=SUBSCRIPTION_ID&AssociateTag=ASSOCIATES_ID&Operation=ItemSearch&Keywords=Da%20Vinci&SearchIndex=Books&Author=Dan%20Brown

The documentation also explains how to use response groups to request specific information about the products. You can choose which product data you need or use a pre-configured response group to get commonly requested data. For example, you can get detailed product information including images, prices, and customer reviews using the "Medium" Response group:

http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService&SubscriptionId=SUBSCRIPTION_ID&AssociateTag=ASSOCIATES_ID&Operation=ItemSearch&Keywords=Da%20Vinci&SearchIndex=Books&Author=Dan%20Brown&ResponseGroup=Medium

Looking up a Specific Item

Use the ItemSearch operation to look up the information for a specific Amazon Standard Item Numbers (ASIN). An ASIN is Amazon's unique identifier that we assign to each product in our catalog. ASIN requests retrieve information for a specific product at Amazon. You can locate the ASIN of any product by going to the detail product page at Amazon. Here's an example of an ASIN request for the book "The Da Vinci Code:"

http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService&SubscriptionId=SUBSCRIPTION_ID&AssociateTag=ASSOCIATES_ID&Operation=ItemLookup&ItemId=0385504209

From these examples, you should be able to envision how you would use a program to download information from Amazon, process it, possibly store it, and then display it.

Resources

Mining Amazon Web Services

Amazon Hacks

Beginning Dynamic Web Sites

Understanding Web Services

HTML & XML for Beginners

More Books

Explore the Amazon Associates Web Services Web site for more information.