Amazon API developers - tutorials

Hi all,

I am a web designer, I have strong skills in html, css and SEO.

now I want to jump into dynamic websites using amazon API.

I have tried astores but they are not SEO friendly (javascript).

I want to create a niche website from scratch usign amazon API, something like http://www.silverlightbooks.net/ (but different niche)

I would be glad if some1 could provide me some tutorials or video tutorials so I can start this project.

thank you

 

I wrote this tutorial, it will definitely be helpful to you.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1478097

 

thank you.

But I am looking for scripting tutorial such as php along with Amazon API

I want to build my own amazon store from scratch, not with an existant script, because the scripts such as AOM and revieazom are not exactly what I want and they are millions of users using it, so it is not SEO friendly

I want to create my own Amazon store using php and Amazon API, a tutorial would be great to start, since I do not know how amazon API works

thank you

 

I don't know of any tutorial that would exactly fit the bill. If you are new to PHP then I think you've got a little way to go before you can program your own Amazon script. However, I had prior programming experience (erm, Commodore 64 assembler ) so was able to learn quite quickly and progress to writing a little hobby site based on the Amazon API, though my site is pretty terrible as regards SEO, since I haven't done much with the data to make it original, except my cunning patented eBay comparison engine, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't!

Anyway, what I want to say is, find a decent PHP tutorial, preferably one which will teach you to work with a framework like CodeIgniter or CakePHP - these take a lot of legwork out of programming and help you write nicely structured object-oriented code instead of the mess that I make! That was my main mistake... Otherwise, I didn't have any particular tutorial, I just started writing stuff and trying to make it work and Googling when I got stuck!

As for using the Amazon API, well I think it's inevitable that you will have to start with Amazon's sample code and start adapting it and building on it. The basic code is actually very straightforward - REST requests make the job very easy, and as long as you use PHP5, it is pretty simple to parse the XML that the API sends you. The tricky part is doing something meaningful with it! There were some tutorials and sample code around, but they may be slightly out of date since Amazon changed the authentication system, though only in a minor way. But no-one is going to give you a huge in-depth
tutorial on how to make an entire store probably.

In short, just start doing it - steal the Amazon sample code, and start building on it and trying stuff out, looking up how to do things in PHP along the way. At least that's the half-a***d way I did it!

Good luck!

 

thanks for replying

I have basic php and mysql experience.
I can connect to a DB and enter and retrive data from the DB using php and mysql.

and that I think is enough to get starting creating an amazon store from scratch.

The problem is that I never used any amazon API, thats why a tutorial would be a great start

but as you said, copy and past sample codes is another way of doing it......

but starting from a tutorial is always good

 

Try playing with ASM2 (http://www.freekrai.net/products/asm2). It's a free script that you can try to customize yourself. May be easier than building from scratch or at least helpful in figuring things out.

 

As piron suggested ASM2 is a good Amazon PHP afilliate script to learn from. As one of the early users of ASM2 I learned a lot about PHP and made some serious money doing so. However today with PHP 5 parsing is much simpler and writing your own "basic" code is pretty simple. The best tutorial I found over the years was a book by Jason Levitt called "The Web Developer's Guide To Amazon E-Commerce Service". While I believe most of the book was devoted to PHP 4 it is certainly worth a look! On Jason Levitt website you will find samples of the source code and more info concerning the content of the book. Though it doesn't look like the scripts have been updated to include the API signature code that is now required by Amazon.

http://www.awsbook.com/

 

uhmmm I already thinking about this, do you know how to export xml to database? I think that is the key...

 

Actually, you can write a simple Amazon script without using a database - I mean sure, there are lots of benefits to storing the Amazon data in a dbase: you can search and sort it in ways you can't do via the API, you can get rid of the annoying Amazon "nodes" and make different categories for yourself, and of course you are caching data if your site gets very busy, or if the API goes down temporarily. But you can still start out mostly accessing the API directly, without much database stuff, if you are not too ambitious to begin with.

 

While caching Amazon's API data certainly has it's advantages. You need to be careful about following the rules concerning doing so in Amazon's user agreement. If I remember correctly we are no longer allowed to cache images, "ALL API DATA" in the cache needs to be deleted on a 24 hour basis and prices when displayed need a time stamp along side if the pricing info is cached. Also you need to be aware of Amazon's 1 request per second rule whether caching or not.

 

I need some amazon api help, preferably .net but as its XML it doesn't matter to much. Willing to pay.