Amazon products API - Looking for basic overview and information

After using the ebay API recently, I was expecting it to be as simple to request info from Amazon, but it seems not...

There does not seem to be a good webpage which explains the basics. For starters, what is the service called? The old name has been dropped I think, and the acronym AWS used everywhere (but isn't that an umbrella term which includes their cloud computing and 20 other services too?).

There is a lack of clear information about the new 'signature' process. Gathering together snippets of detail from various pages I've stumbled upon, it seems that prior to August 2009 you just needed a developer account with Amazon to make requests and get XML back. Now you have to use some fancy encryption process to create an extra number in your querystring. Does this mean Amazon data is completely out of reach for the programmer who just wants a quick and simple solution?

There seems to be a tiny bit of information on RSS feeds, and you can get a feed of items that have been 'tagged' easily, but I can't tell if there is a way to search for titles using RSS too. Some websites seem to suggest this, but I think they are out of date now?

If anyone can give a short 开发者_如何学Pythonsummary to the current state of play I'd be very grateful. All I want to do is go from a book title in my database, and use Classic ASP to get a set of products that match from Amazon, listing cover images and prices.

Amazon 'widgets' can display keyword search results on my pages, but I have less control over these, and they are shown to the user only - my code can't look inside them.

Your post contains several questions, so I'll try to answer them one at a time:

1. The API you're interested in is the Product Advertising API (PA). It allows you programmatic access to search and retrieve product information from Amazon's catalog. If you're having trouble finding information on the API, that's because the web service has undergone two name changes in recent history: it was also known as ECS and AAWS.
2. The signature process you're referring to is the same HMAC signature that all of the other AWS services use for authentication. All that's required to sign your requests to the Product Advertising API is a function to compute a SHA-1 hash and and AWS developer key. For more information, see the section of the developer documentation on signing requests.
3. As far as I know, there is no support for retrieving RSS feeds of products or tags through PA. If anyone has information suggesting otherwise, please correct me.
4. Either the REST or SOAP APIs should make your use case very straight forward. Amazon provides a fairly basic "getting started" guide available here. As well, you can view the complete API developer documentation here.

Although the documentation is a little hard to find (likely due to all the name changes), the PA API is very well documented and rather elegant. With a modicum of elbow grease and some previous experience in calling out to web services, you shouldn't have any trouble getting the information you need from the API.

I agree that Amazon appears to be intentionally obfuscating even how to find the API documentation, as well as use it. I'm just speculating though.

Renaming the services from "ECS" to "Product Advertising API" was probably also not the best move, it essentially invalidated all that Google mojo they had built up over time.

It took me quite a while to 'discover' this updated link for the Product Advertising API. I don't remember being able to easily discover it through the typical 'Developer' link on the Amazon webpage. This documentation appears to valid and what I've worked from recently.

The change to authentication procedures also seems to add further complexity, but I'm sure they have a reason for it.

I use SOAP via C# to communicate with Amazon Product API.

With the REST API you have to encrypt the whole URL in a fairly specific way. The params have to be sorted, etc. There is just more to do. With the SOAP API, you just encrypt the operation+timestamp, and thats it.

Adam O'Neil's post here, How to get album, dvd, and blueray cover art from Amazon, walks through the SOAP with C# method. Its not the original sample I pulled down, and contrary to his comment, it was not an official Amazon sample I stumbled on, though the code looks identical. However, Adam does a good job at presenting all the necessary steps. I wish I could credit the original author.

I wrote a blog post on this subject, after spending hours wading through Amazon's obscure documentation. Maybe useful as another view on the process.

I found a good alternative for requesting amazon product information here: http://api-doc.axesso.de/

Its an free rest api which return alle relevant information related to the requested product.

Some links i found:

• Forum thread for amazon tutorial request
• Amazon Web Services
• Some sort of script for using the amazon eCommerce API
• another tutorial for amazon web-store-y stuff
• Amazon and ebay e-commerce API tutorials

Straight from the horse's moutyh: Summary of Product Advertising API Operations which has the following categories:

• Find Items
• Find Out More About Specific Items
• Shopping Cart
• Customer Content
• Seller Information
• Other Operations

Since the time when the question was asked in 2009 the changes have, unsurprisingly, continued and some of the answers and links provided are now superseded or deadlinks.

As of February 2022, Amazon now provide the Product Advertising API Scratchpad for developers to try out API requests so they can get up and running in minutes:

Scratchpad is a tool to help Amazon Associates send basic requests to the Product Advertising API. Follow the steps below and you can have a working request with sample code in minutes.

The linked page also has onward links to pages where you may sign up for the Associate program and Product Advertising API and access the complete API documentation.

As mentioned by @Reg Edit in his recent answer, Amazon now provides a scratchpad for their Product Advertising API, which in-fact does have a "SearchItems" endpoint which presumably returns products for a search query similar to the one a shopper would enter into Amazon's search bar while shopping.

Here's a link explaining on how to get access to Amazon's Product Advertising API. This would be helpful for anyone looking to display Amazon product's on their application programmatically.

In order to get access to Amazon's Product Advertising API, you must meet the following 3 requirements:

1. Have completed 3 sales in the last 180 days
2. Have an approved associates account
3. Comply with this agreement

Now if you don't meet the above requirements, the only other option Amazon gives you is to use their SiteStripe widget, which is a tool to help associates build links manually.

If you do not meet the requirements listed above and would still like to get Amazon product data for your app or website programmatically, you may use web scraping to achieve the same. Since the data is public, no one can legally stop you from scraping it. Depending on how experienced you are with programming, you could either build a scraper yourself or use a service that enables you to do so.

I have built one such service myself—it is called Amazon Product Search API and it allows users to grab search results from Amazon including product title, thumbnail, URL, etc. for any search query a user would make while shopping on Amazon. It supports all the major countries Amazon operates in.

Using this service does not require you to be an Amazon associate. Users may scrape up to 10k search results for free.