What if price changes while you list amazon products on your website with prices?

Hi,

Prices of the products may change anytime ok?
When you list the amazon product with price today, after 6-24 months price may change and then the price listed on your website will be wrong information.
How you guys manage this in amazon affiliate?
Do you update prices every time? How can you manage to update prices when you have thousands of amazon products listed on your website?
Or is there any way to retrieve prices from amazon website using some scripts so that price change are reflected immediately on the affiliate website.

Any help regarding this would be appreciated.

 

As for me I update my products prices manually from time to time.

 

I use "Click here to check price" on some of my sites. People click on my affiliate link, check the price direct from Amazon and decide to buy or not.

Some people create Squidoo lenses that use this technique.

 

Unless you're using the API and pulling from their feeds I'm pretty sure it's against their TOS and could get you banned by misrepresenting the price/description. There's some commercial plugins that pulls from their feeds and updates the prices automatically. Having a different price than what's listed at Amazon is a no-no.

 

The prices of most commodity products change daily depending on the needs of the sellers...why would you want to commit yourself to a price and have your reader see another price on AZ?
Make a general statement about the 'value' is my suggestion.

 

Even when we use product advertising API, there is a requirement to add a timestamp adjacent to the price, when they are updated less frequently than hourly.
So you should have something like this for every price:

$159.00
as of 7/16/2012 7:20 PDT - Details

If clicked on the details this disclaimer should be shown:
Product prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on amazon.com at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.

 

I think to mention "Go to Amazon to check prices" is a good idea and not to directly mention price on the site.

 

But how to use API to pull prices data from amazon feeds? How can I do this? I am a php programmer but don't understand API.

 

The API is easy, you just need to understand it, and that's the problem. 4 months ago I was also like you.
You just need to create the request, and the return is an XML, what you can parse with simplexml, and then it is easy(almost).

There are examples how to create the request, just search for amazon api php, and you will find some tutorials. Some are really good.

Even if you will be able to pull the info you need, the XML is a bit confusing. To find the actual price you need to check over about 4-5 things...

If you don't have time for this, then the "Go to Amazon to check prices" is the easiest solution...

 

Yes you have to pull prices via their API in order to show them without violating TOS and show the time the price is current as of next to it as people have said above. Also, you're required to cache the information pulled from the API so as to not request the same information too often. If you don't cache and get too many requests you may have your API credentials revoked.

Also, most of the PHP API stuff is outdated and doesn't reflect the need to hash and sign the request with HMAC and your affiliate tag so be careful.

 

Great. Thanks for all your help whoever participated in this debate.