• Home
• Produce
• Promote
• Profit
• Forums
• Blog
• Search

Amazon Web Services: A Brief Introduction Using PHP

By: Dan O'Brien, Published: 2004-02-02, Parent Categories: Affiliate Programs, PHP

• Print

Are you a webmaster? Are you interested in opening up an online affiliate store that updates product information automatically? Perhaps you currently use affiliate programs to promote large quantities of products, but are looking for a way out of the copy-and-paste tedium of individual product link upkeep?

Dear webmaster, allow me to introduce you to Amazon Web Services. With Amazon Web Services (AWS) you can easily showcase dozens, hundreds, even thousands of products on your website in no time at all. With AWS you are directly accessing Amazon's vast product catalog to retrieve not only a product's title and price, but editorial content, customer reviews, special features, and much more. The best part: it runs on autopilot. Once you have AWS setup there's nothing to update, no remote feed to download over and over again. It runs itself, saving you precious time and energy.

In this introduction I will show you how to create a very basic AWS site. Using a travel site as a backdrop, you will learn how to construct the XML link to Amazon then parse the XML using PHP. Amazon offers two methods to retrieve product info: SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and REST (representational state transfer, or XML over HTTP). The REST method will be used in this article. Once you go through the tutorial and play with the sample code, it will be easy to see how virtually any website can benefit from the power of AWS.

Amazon Web Services Example in PHP

Our AWS example begins with a fictitious travel site, Destination-USA. Destination-USA contains travel essays and photos on popular U.S. tourist destinations. As the enterprising site owner, you decide to add a little value by including Amazon.com's selection of travel books for Disney World, Las Vegas, and Washington, D.C. You want to give your visitors the opportunity to browse the book categories, view detailed info on each book, and search for books. What pages do we need to build?

• Browse Page
  The Browse Page will display a list of up to 10 books (AWS returns a maximum of 10 products per search). Each book will display essential information such as title, price, availability, and a small cover image. Visitors will be able to sort the results by Featured Item, Sales Rank, or Customer Reviews. A search box for "Books" will be located at the top of the page and pagination links will be located at the bottom of the page. Each book will link to its Product Page.
  
  
• Product Page
  The Product Page will display 1 single book. The page will include all the data from the Browse Page as well as the editorial review, author(s), average customer rating, up to 3 customer reviews, publisher info, and the buy link to Amazon.com. Additionally, each author will be hyperlinked to a Search Results Page containing his or her titles.
  
  
• Search Results Page
  Similar in layout to the Browse Page, the Search Results Page will display up to 10 books from a keyword or author search.
  
  

Preproduction Work

Before work can start on the site it is important to get some necessary information and accounts setup.

Get an Amazon.com Associates ID

You need to be an Amazon Associate to get paid commission for the items your visitors buy via your site. If you are already an associate Amazon allows you to use your current ID.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/?node=3435371

Apply for a Developer's Token

A Developer's Token is required to access AWS. It functions much in the same way as a password. You will pass it to Amazon's servers with every request so that they know you have permission to access their system.
https://associates.amazon.com/exec/panama/associates/join/developer/application.html

Find your BrowseNodes on Amazon.com

A BrowseNode is a numeric identifier of an Amazon category. BrowseNodes are an extremely important component to AWS. You use the BrowseNode to tell AWS which category you want to access. On Amazon.com, every single category within its enormous electronic confines has a BrowseNode. All told, there are roughly 25,000 BrowseNodes. For Destination-USA, we need to find 3 BrowseNodes. You find a BrowseNode by surfing to the category page:

We'll use the BrowseNode numbers when we build the XML links for the Browse Page.

• Site Categories

  • Website Development
  • Website Promotion
  • Generating Revenue
  • Search Engine Optimization
  • Website Management
  • Business Management
  • Build a Successful Website
  • SEO Guide

• Tools

  • DMCA Form Generator
  • Two Step Links

• Recent Blog Posts