Traversing The Browse Node Hierarchy - Amazon Product Advertising API Developer's Manual

Product Advertising API Developer Guide
ItemSearch (p. 196) returns all of the items associated with a node and all of the nodes below it. For that
reason, you can see that a search at the level of Women's Shoes will return all of the items related to
Women's Boots and Women's Sneakers. If the customer was really only interested in women's boots,
the response would contain a lot of uninteresting results—all of the items that are women's sneakers. A
more targeted search would have specified the Boots browse node using ItemSearch 's BrowseNode
parameter. For example, if the browse node ID of Women's Boots is 123456, a targeted request would
be a follows.
http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?
Service=AWSECommerceService&
AWSAccessKeyId=[AWS Access Key
Operation=ItemSearch&
Keywords=tall&
SearchIndex=Apparel&
BrowseNode=123456
&Timestamp=[YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssZ]
&Signature=[Request Signature]

Traversing the Browse Node Hierarchy

As we have seen, you traverse down the hierarchy to make your search more targeted. You might also
traverse up the tree to find, for example, the root category of a product. For example, if you have an item,
such as a carving knife, you might find the node it is associated with and go up the hierarchy to find the
root product category of knives and then, in another request, use the TopSellers response group to return
the top sellers in the product category. These top sellers might be of interest to your customer.
BrowseNodeLookup (p. 165)
When you supply it a browse node ID, it returns the name of the browse node as well as its direct
descendants and a lineage of ancestors. Look at the response to the following request.
http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?
Service=AWSECommerceService&
AWSAccessKeyId=[Access Key ID&
Operation=BrowseNodeLookup&
BrowseNodeId=11232&
ResponseGroup=BrowseNodeInfo
&Timestamp=[YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssZ]
&Signature=[Request Signature]
A snippet of its response follows.
<Item>
<ASIN>0131856340</ASIN>
<BrowseNodes>
<BrowseNode>
<BrowseNodeId>11232</BrowseNodeId>
<Name> Social Sciences</Name>
<Ancestors>
<BrowseNode>
<BrowseNodeId>53</BrowseNodeId>
<Name>Nonfiction</Name>
<Ancestors>
<BrowseNode>
<BrowseNodeId>1000</BrowseNodeId>
<Name>Subjects</Name>
Finding Items Using Browse Nodes
ID]&
operation is the most direct way of traversing the browse node hierarchy.
API Version 2011-08-01
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