Amazon Product Advertising API: Basic Overview

The advent of Application Programming Interface has spawned an era of using multiple applications together rendering seamless user-experience. It puts several applications together with the ability to operate with high-speed. With increased availability of internet-based services, there are plenty of APIs available in the market.

Different technical inclinations demand different services, which are provided by popular APIs present in the market viz. Amazon APIs, Google APIs, Salesforce APIs, Facebook APIs etc. Amongst all of them Amazon Product Advertising API web-services have grown form nothing to acquiring a top position in the web-world. The e-commerce powerhouse now operates as a service-oriented architecture, delivering seamless web-services.

Amazon has released its various APIs to access its huge catalogs, which allow developers to access information from Amazon following simple protocols. It’s offerings for developers include:

• Amazon Marketplace web services: This API helps Amazon sellers to swap data on orders, reports, payments and listings, which enables selling automation and help sellers grow their business. It provides many features like order management, inventory management, reports management, create inbound shipments, check status of inbound shipments, track and manage outbound shipment requests.
• Product advertisement API: Using Product advertisement API you can access Amazon product selection, it leverages Amazon product discovery capabilities and provide wide scopes to monetize your website.
• Amazon Payments API: Amazon payments API makes things easy for you and your customers, by allowing your customers pay for their purchases by accessing the information stored in Amazon accounts.

In this post we will mainly discuss about the Amazon’s product advertising API providing programmatic access to product selection, so as to advertise Amazon products and monetize websites. Who doesn’t want to advertise Amazon product and generate revenues out of it?

But the point is ‘what are the methods you can follow to advertise Amazon products?’As there is a huge selection of Amazon products, this API has a feature that lets you advertise this entire selection.

1. You can advertise a product by using Itemlookup requests to get product titles, image URLs, links back to Amazon and prices for listed products on Amazon.
2. Other than this you can assist the users find or search Amazon products they are looking for, by fetching relevant search results, product listings and prices. You can use ItemSearch requests to fetch these results.
3. Also, you can help the users find new products, popular products, most wanted Amazon products or most searched for products.

Accessing Amazon Product Advertising API

While working with Amazon Product Advertising API, you must take care of the operations to use, response groups and the brows nodes.

Operations: These are methods that inform API about the specific actions you need to perform like SimilarityLookup, ItemSearch, ItemLookup.

Response Groups: These are best described as pre-defined result sets in the API viz. ItemAttributes, NewReleases, Images,Medium. Itemlds, EditorialReviews and Reviews. Using response groups developers can specify the data that is to be returnmed by the API.

Browse Nodes: These are referred to as the product categories in Amazon- The first general product category that lets you select the type of product category you wish to visit.

You can use the following class in order to access the Amazon product advertising API from PHP.

Depending upon your requirements, you can implement the access operations like ItemLookup, Itemsearch etc., in the class. However, before this you need to create an access key used to authenticate requests to Amazon Product Service API. You can obtain this by signing up to Amazon web service account and create a new access key. This will give you your own affiliate id that can be used to access the API.

The basic idea of product service API is to use various response groups and request parameters to Narrow search results, to structure requests and responses, and making REST requests to search for items. This API is used by your application to fetch items, prices, images and other description to present to your website’s customers. Whenver the customers shops on your website, an HTML form is sent to Product Advertising API and the pyurchase is completed by Amazon after verifying the entire information viz. shipping method, payment method and completes the order.

Amazon has produced various APIs and tools to assist developers utilize their services and earn monetary benefits. The Product Advertising API is an opportunity to make your hold in the marketplace irrespective of the foot-traffic of your storefront.

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