Does Amazon.com offer a data feed?
New Associates often ask if Amazon.com provides a data feed with information on the products sold by Amazon.
Amazon offers "Bulk Data Feeds" which enable you to download information for all Amazon products all at once. The feeds are updated daily and contain price, availability, shipping, merchant IDs, image URLs, product descriptions, sales rank, browse node information, and customer reviews for all products sold on Amazon. If you are interested in getting access to the data feed, contact associates [at] amazon.com.
The data feed files are very large and require a great deal of time and disk space to process. They are generally only offered to Associates with very special requirements.
Instead of using the product feed, consider using Amazon Associate Web Services (A2S).
Amazon product information is available through Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS offers a number of web services, but the one of interest to Associates is A2S.
You can think of A2S as a remote database you query to get information on Amazon products. Unlike a data feed which is usually downloaded into a database on your server, the A2S web services provide specific information when it's needed by your application.
Amazon offers an extensive documention for A2S at:
Use of A2S requires some knowlege of programming - generally in a server-side scripting language like PHP. But there are many commercial and free programs which use A2S. Some are listed in Amazon's list of Solutions For Amazon Associates, but many more can be found by searching the Internet.
For a complete storefront which can be added to your web site, your options include:
Related Articles:
For some ideas on how to cache information received from A2S, please see Working With the "One-Second" Rule. For some example code in PHP, see PHP Examples. | 