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Product Advertising API Developer Guide
What Is the Product Advertising API?
The Product Advertising API gives you much of the functionality that you see in action on Amazon's retail
web site, http://www.amazon.com. That functionality includes:
• Finding items to buy.
These items are for sale by Amazon or other merchants.
• Finding information about those items.
This item information includes such things as the titles of tracks on a CD, the rating of a movie, the
kind of metal used in a piece of jewelry, accessories that go with an item, the author of a book, or the
composer of a piece of music.
• Getting customer reviews of items.
Show customers what others think about the items on sale.
• Create a fully-functional shopping cart.
Add items that are immediately available or ones that will become available in the future, such as in a
pre-sale of a book.
• Adding, removing, and otherwise modifying the items in the shopping cart.
Have full control over the contents of their shopping cart.
• Getting information about the company selling the item.
Show customers what others think about the merchant selling the item.
• Finding similar items for sale.
Generate additional sales by suggesting other items similar to the ones the customers are buying.
• Purchasing the items in the shopping cart.
Once the customer decides to buy the contents in their shopping cart, Amazon takes care of the shipping,
payment, and order fulfillment, or notifies you to take care of the same.
• Find items on a friend's wishlist, wedding registry or baby registry and purchase those items.
Product Advertising API offers you the tools to create a complete, rich online shopping experience for
customers.
How Do I Make Money Using the Product
Advertising API?
You can make money when you use the Product Advertising API to advertise Amazon products in
conjunction with the Amazon Associates Program. How? You earn referral fees when you join the Amazon
Associates program and the users you refer to Amazon sites buy qualifying products.
You need to get an Amazon Associates account and ensure that you include your associate tag in API
requests. That way the URLs returned by the API contain your Associate tag and when a user visits an
Amazon site through a tagged link and buys a product, the developer earns referral fees. For more
information about getting an Amazon Associates account, see
International Locales
Product Advertising API hosts multiple locales so that developers around the world can take advantage
of Amazon's multi-language support. Each locale uses the language, customs, and formats, such as date,
time, and money formats, particular to that locale. You can see how this plays out by viewing the
homepages for Amazon's different locales:
What Is the Product Advertising API?
API Version 2011-08-01
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Becoming an Associate (p.
9).
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Troubleshooting
