Amazon Web Services Made Easy

I've put together a very simple interface for those who want to add items from Amazon stores to their web sites. My module handles all of the "back end" stuff, such as establishing the connection to Amazon and processing the data, and then presents it to you in a PHP array. From there you can easily display the data in whatever format you'd like on your site.

I've got a sample site to give you an idea of what it can do... keep in mind that I write code, I don't design web sites so this is very much "no frills".

http://www.ecsws.com

There's a couple of different "stores" on the main page to give you an idea of what can be accomplished. This one for example: http://www.ecsws.com/demo1/amazon.php?node=656734 is at the lowest "node" in the tree, so there are no subcategories to be displayed. This one: http://www.ecsws.com/demo1/amazon.php?node=3375251 is more in the middle, so the user could also navigate down through the subcategories to further refine their results.

This one: http://www.ecsws.com/demo2/amazon/301187/1/Phones.html uses "descriptive" URLs on both the overview and detail pages... spiders seem to like that kind of URL and it's easier on the eyes.

These two are both from the "top level" of Amazon, so your users could browse through pretty much everything. The first uses regular URLs, the second uses "descriptive" URLs:

http://www.ecsws.com/demo1/amazon.php
http://www.ecsws.com/demo2/amazon.php

You, as the site owner, can define the starting point for your store, simply by specifiying the starting node. Once you've set all of your parameters, all you need to do is call a "get_data()" function and all of the data releated to your results are returned in an array. From there you can manipulate it however you'd like, or just display it as-is.

Of course, you specific your Associate ID so when somebody purchases a product from your store (through Amazon) you get a commission for it.

Also, the data returned from Amazon is cached for a short time, so the first time a user goes to a page, it's stored locally. The next time that user (or any other user, for that matter) goes to that page it's retrieved from the local cache instead of going back to retrieve it from Amazon. This increases speed and limits the amount of bandwidth used.

I had a similar version of this application running on one of my sites, that I never got around to completing and making live. However, Google's spider has hit the site many many times and there are currently over 25k pages in Google's index from this site, 99% of those being from this store.

I've also got plans for adding additional modules, for doing the same sort of thing with eBay, MSN, Yahoo, etc. .

This requires PHP 5 and mod_rewrite (if you want to use the descriptive URLs), and will probably require the ionCube loader.

If there is interest in this, I'll pack it up and offer it as a product. Let me know!

 

Does it only run the way that you can provide a node and it goes from there? While this is nice to have the thousands of products in there, I am actually looking for a product where I can define some parameters for output and throw in some ASIN per page for output.

With such you actually can choose which products to use, rather than going with the need of always having everything.

 

I'm not sure I'm getting what you mean... What sort of parameters would you like to define? Give me an idea of what the result would be and I can tell you how to get there using this.

Here's a quick example: http://www.ecsws.com/demo4/amazon.php?index=DVD&keywords=soccer&page=1

That page is searching for "soccer" in the "DVD" index, nothing else. It needs a little bit of tweaking, some of the returned data isn't quite right (like the "next page", and the page title), but those are minor issues.

By changing the "index=" and "keywords=" parameters in the URL you can search different indexes or for different keywords. For example, http://www.ecsws.com/demo4/amazon.php?index=Apparel&keywords=nascar&page=1 will return NASCAR apparel.

Is that the kind of thing you're talking about?

 

All scripts go into the feeds and display everything from it (yes, limited to a search term) but do not allow control of what actually to display on the page.

What I am looking for is basically to have a way to have an array of ASINs I want to be on an page - like the widgets Amazon is offering, just that the results / display from them is awful.

 

So... you want to be able to supply a list of ASINs and have it return data on those? That's very easy to do...

This page, for example, I've passed the engine 3 ASINs, it returned all of the data but the only thing I want to display is a medium-sized image and the title of the item: http://www.ecsws.com/demo4/some_asins.php

Is that what you mean?