Does Amazon.com offer a data feed?

Amazon offers "Bulk Data Feeds" which enable you to download information for all Amazon products all at once. The feeds are updated daily and contain price, availability, shipping, merchant IDs, image URLs, product descriptions, sales rank, browse node information, and customer reviews for all products sold on Amazon. If you are interested in getting access to the data feed, contact associates [at] amazon.com.

Amazon product information is also available through their Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS offers a number of web services, but the one of interest to Associates is their Amazon Associates Web Services (A2S).

You can think of A2S as a remote database you query to get information on Amazon products. Unlike a data feed which is usually downloaded into a database on your server, the A2S web services provide specific information when it's needed by your application.

Amazon offers an extensive documention for A2S at:

• A2S Home Page
• A2S Developers Forum
• A2S Resource Center

Use of A2S requires some knowlege of programming - generally in a server-side scripting language like PHP. But there are many commercial and free programs which use A2S. Some are listed in Amazon's list of Solutions For Amazon Associates, but many more can be found by searching the Internet.

For a complete storefront which can be added to your web site, your options include:

• Associate-O-Matic
• Amazon's aStore
• MrRat's Amazon Products Feed

For some ideas on how to cache information received from A2S, please see Working With the "One-Second" Rule. For some example code in PHP, see PHP Examples.