Amazon products API - Looking for basic overview and information

Question

After using the ebay API recently  I was expecting it to be as simple to request info from Amazon  but it seems not     There does not seem to be a good webpage which explains the basics  For starters  what is the service called  The old name has been dropped I think  and the acronym AWS used everywhere  but isn t that an umbrella term which includes their cloud computing and 20 other services too     There is a lack of clear information about the new  signature  process  Gathering together snippets of detail from various pages I ve stumbled upon  it seems that prior to August 2009 you just needed a developer account with Amazon to make requests and get XML back  Now you have to use some fancy encryption process to create an extra number in your querystring  Does this mean Amazon data is completely out of reach for the programmer who just wants a quick and simple solution   There seems to be a tiny bit of information on RSS feeds  and you can get a feed of items that have been  tagged  easily  but I can t tell if there is a way to search for titles using RSS too  Some websites seem to suggest this  but I think they are out of date now   If anyone can give a short summary to the current state of play I d be very grateful  All I want to do is go from a book title in my database  and use Classic ASP to get a set of products that match from Amazon  listing cover images and prices   Amazon  widgets  can display keyword search results on my pages  but I have less control over these  and they are shown to the user only - my code can t look inside them

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I found a good alternative for requesting amazon product information here  http   api-doc axesso de   Its an free rest api which return alle relevant information related to the requested product

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I wrote a blog post on this subject  after spending hours wading through Amazon s obscure documentation  Maybe useful as another view on the process

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Some links i found    Forum thread for amazon tutorial request Amazon Web Services Some sort of script for using the amazon eCommerce API another tutorial for amazon web-store-y stuff Amazon and ebay e-commerce API tutorials

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I agree that Amazon appears to be intentionally obfuscating even how to find the API documentation  as well as use it   I m just speculating though   Renaming the services from  ECS  to  Product Advertising API  was probably also not the best move  it essentially invalidated all that Google mojo they had built up over time     It took me quite a while to  discover  this updated link for the Product Advertising API   I don t remember being able to easily discover it through the typical  Developer  link on the Amazon webpage  This documentation appears to valid and what I ve worked from recently   The change to authentication procedures also seems to add further complexity  but I m sure they have a reason for it     I use SOAP via C  to communicate with Amazon Product API       With the REST API you have to encrypt   the whole URL in a fairly specific   way   The params have to be sorted    etc   There is just more to do   With   the SOAP API  you just encrypt the   operation timestamp  and thats it    Adam O Neil s post here  How to get album  dvd  and blueray cover art from Amazon  walks through the SOAP with C  method   Its not the original sample I pulled down  and contrary to his comment  it was not an official Amazon sample I stumbled on  though the code looks identical   However  Adam does a good job at presenting all the necessary steps   I wish I could credit the original author

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Your post contains several questions  so I ll try to answer them one at a time    The API you re interested in is the Product Advertising API  PA   It allows you programmatic access to search and retrieve product information from Amazon s catalog  If you re having trouble finding information on the API  that s because the web service has undergone two name changes in recent history  it was also known as ECS and AAWS  The signature process you re referring to is the same HMAC signature that all of the other AWS services use for authentication  All that s required to sign your requests to the Product Advertising API is a function to compute a SHA-1 hash and and AWS developer key  For more information  see the section of the developer documentation on signing requests  As far as I know  there is no support for retrieving RSS feeds of products or tags through PA  If anyone has information suggesting otherwise  please correct me  Either the REST or SOAP APIs should make your use case very straight forward  Amazon provides a fairly basic  getting started  guide available here  As well  you can view the complete API developer documentation here    Although the documentation is a little hard to find  likely due to all the name changes   the PA API is very well documented and rather elegant  With a modicum of elbow grease and some previous experience in calling out to web services  you shouldn t have any trouble getting the information you need from the API

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Straight from the horse s moutyh  Summary of Product Advertising API Operations which has the following categories    Find Items Find Out More About Specific Items Shopping Cart Customer Content Seller Information Other Operations

[amazon-web-services] Amazon products API - Looking for basic overview and information

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