Motivating Customers to Buy

Motivating customers to buy products through your web site is vital to the health of your business. Many Amazon Associates Web Service operations and response groups provide ways to pique a customer's interest and help drive sales. All of the sections in this chapter explain ways to enhance the selling potential of your web site.

Topics

Returning New Releases From Shopping Cart Items

A great way to spur add-on sales is by presenting customers with newly released items that are similar to items in their shopping cart. The CartNewReleases response group enables you to do this. This response group works with most cart operations.

The CartNewReleases response group returns the ASINs and titles of the top five new releases in the root category of the item specified in the cart operation. For example, when adding a television to a cart the top five new releases in the root category, electronics, are returned.

In the following request, an item is added twice to a newly-created shopping cart.

http://ecs.amazonaws.com/onca/xml?
Service=AWSECommerceService&
AWSAccessKeyId=[AWS Access Key ID]&
AssociateId=ws&
Operation=CartCreate&
Item.1.ASIN=B000062TU1&
MergeCart=True&
Item.1.Quantity=2&
ResponseGroup=CartNewReleases

The response includes a new release from the root product category.

<NewReleases>
  <NewRelease>
    <ASIN>B00005JOFQ</ASIN>
    <Title>Brokeback Mountain (Widescreen Edition)</Title>
  </NewRelease>
</NewReleases>