Has anyone had experience with making a storefront using Amazon's products? Not talking aStore or pre-made scripts that make your website look generic. I'm talking about creating a whole new branded website, powered by Amazon and selling Amazon products. I'm looking into getting something like this running but do not know quite where to start. Do you integrate AWS into existing e-commerce programs? Or do you build it from scratch? Your input is greatly appreciated
I'm in the process of developing an amazon storefront now.. I've started from scratch, using SOAP to get information from Amazons Product Advertising API. One thing you should think about is that amazon only lets you do one request per second, so you should cache the data you get. I'm not sure how long you can cache the data, but look at amazons tos or something.
Since writing my original post I've learned a lot of new things about Amazon Product API. It's interesting you're using SOAP over REST - is it that much harder to use like people are saying? Also thanks for the heads-up with the one request / s alert. What method would you use for caching their data?
I built my own script and have been using it for a few sites. It uses REST and I cache information locally in the database. I make sure I comply with Amazons TOS by updating the price of the products every 15 minutes. I would be interested to know any advantages of using SOAP. It seemed much more complex to me and potentially finicky on different hosts. Feel free to contact me if you need any advice.
I've never used REST, and this is the first time I'm using SOAP. REST might be easier to use (I wouldnt know), but SOAP isn't hard in PHP. I haven't started with the caching yet, but I have plans to save the info I need from the requests in a MySQL database.