Amazon Affiliate Shopping Cart API

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEcommerceService/2007-01-17/PgUsingShoppingCartArticle.html

From this article, it doesn't say if after the visitor is sent to Amazon to complete the purchase, there's any way for you (as the affiliate) to receive a notification of whether or not they actually placed an order.

Anyone have experience with this?

 

You can't get a notification of the order being placed unfortunately. For reporting in my script, I just show the people that have been redirected to Amazon and the products they had in their cart etc. That way you can check roughly using the reports Amazon give you.

I suspect this is to avoid things like cashback websites, commission sharing schemes etc. For example someone could setup an "Amazon Commission Share" website where I buy from your link, and you buy from mine. Without the feedback on the order placed there is no way to verify this...

 

Chit, I suspected that, so there's no way to get accurate data, you can only make assumptions on what was purchased.

What about using a tracking ID with the affiliate product links that corresponds to some unique ID for that visitor in your own system, then regularly exporting the CSV sales report from Amazon and importing into your own DB?

 

Yes that would work, very good idea. Creating the tracking id's would be a problem as you have to login to your account to do it (can't be done via the API). So it would only work where you have a registration type system - the user signs up to your site, you create a tracking id for them, then enable the user on your site.

Maybe they limit the number of tracking ID's as well...

 

Good point about the manual tracking ID creation...crap. Amazon sure does make it difficult for us, don't they?