How can I create simple text links to Amazon.com using UPCs?

Using Amazon's Web Services (AWS) you can do an ItemLookup using a UPC to get information on the product including the ASIN. It only works if the catalog data at Amazon contains the UPC, so it works for most products. But there are some products that fall through the cracks.

Another method is to use the "Link to Search Results" tool in Associates Central under "Link to Any Page at Amazon.com" / "Link to Search Results". Enter a UPC as the phrase to search for and generate the link. Copy the URL from the resulting code. You can use the URL as a template because you can easily see the UPC in it and replace that UPC with any other UPC. Use this as a link to Amazon.com. It won't link directly to the product, but the product should show up first in the search results.

Here's an example URL created by entering the UPC 078636512822:

A third option is to use a service provided by BrowseNodes.com which uses AWS to look up a product by UPC and displays the page at Amazon.com for the product.

Use this service by creating URLs of the form:

Replace UPC with the UPC of the product. Replace YOURTAG with your Associates Tag. Replace KEYWORDS with a short keyword or phrase describing the product (replace spaces in the phrase with plus symbols ('+').

For example,

The above URL can be used as a link to Amazon.com. It looks up the product with the UPC of 078636512822. If a product is found with that URL, the product's detail page is displayed at Amazon.com.

If a product with the specified UPC is not found, a search page from Amazon.com is displayed based on the keyword or phrase specified in the keywords parameter. If keywords is blank or not specified, Amazon's home page is displayed.

Nine times out of ten, the above service will use your Associates Tag when displaying the page from Amazon.com. In order to provide this service, BrowseNodes.com's tag is used 10% of the time.