Amazon Product Advertising API Developer's Manual page 166

Product Advertising API Developer Guide
around another purpose, please reconsider and make sure your proposed Product Advertising API
application falls within the guidelines of the Product Advertising API Terms and Conditions. Applications
that do not meet the Product Advertising API Terms and Conditions will be blocked from accessing Product
Advertising API.
Use the Latest API Version
Product Advertising API makes frequent releases. Each release either adds functionality or increases
the accuracy, speed, and stability of Product Advertising API. Most releases do all of these. Go to
http://aws.amazon.com/resources
To use the latest version of the API, you must include the Version parameter in your requests. Otherwise,
Product Advertising API uses the default API version, which is from 2005-10-05.
Product Advertising API 3.0 has been deprecated and will be shut down at the end of March 2008. Make
sure you develop against Product Advertising API 4.0.
Understand Available Operations
Product Advertising API provides many different operations to facilitate product discovery. Using the right
operations can dramatically enhance your customer's shopping experience and increase your Associate
commissions. See the API Reference for a full description of all Product Advertising API operations. Some
enable you to:
Task
Find products and categories
Find similar items
Provide shopping cart functionality for your
application or web site
Use the Right Response Group
One of the great features of Product Advertising API is the control you have over the amount of information
returned in responses. A response group is a collection of data returned by Product Advertising API.
Product Advertising API has over 55 response groups, each serving a different need. So, you can get
exactly the information you need and no more.
We recommend that you specify response groups that return only the information your application needs.
Response groups, such as Large, and ItemAttributes return lots of data. Such large data sets sometimes
incur performance penalties both in Product Advertising API fulfilling the request and in your application's
processing of the response.
Use Your Associate Tag in Product Advertising
API Requests
To earn commissions for selling Amazon items, you must register with Amazon as an Associate. Go to
http://amazon.com/associates. In return, you receive an Associate tag, which identifies you. By including
your Associate tag in each Product Advertising API request, you receive commissions for customer
purchases.
Use the Latest API Version
frequently for documentation about the latest release.
Operations
ItemSearch , ItemLookup , and
BrowseNodeLookup
SimilarityLookup ,
CartCreate , CartAdd , CartModify , and
CartGet
API Version 2011-08-01
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