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When someone other than Amazon is selling an item, a customer sometimes wants reassurance that the seller is reputable. Sending money to a merchant the customer has not and will not meet raises the specter of fraud. By providing customer reviews of sellers, you can help remove some of the concerns that customers reasonably have about purchasing items over the Internet.
Sample seller feedback from Amazon's retail web site is shown in the following figure.
Amazon Associates Web Service returns the same information in the Seller response group, which can be used in SellerLookup requests, for example:
http://ecs.amazonaws.com/onca/xml? Service=AWSECommerceService& AWSAccessKeyId=[ID]& Operation=SellerLookup& SellerId=[Seller ID]& ResponseGroup=Seller
The following XML is a snippet of the full response for this request.
<Seller>
<SellerId>A8989898989963</SellerId>
<Nickname>alphabooks</Nickname>
<GlancePage>http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/seller/at-a-glance.html?seller=A898
9898989963&marketplaceSeller=1</GlancePage>
<Location>
<City>Fort Smith</City>
<State>AR</State>
</Location>
<AverageFeedbackRating>4.9</AverageFeedbackRating>
<TotalFeedback>325</TotalFeedback>
<TotalFeedbackPages>65</TotalFeedbackPages>
<SellerFeedback>
<Feedback>
<Rating>5</Rating>
<Comment>fast shipping, great product, absolutely no complaints here! A+</Comment>
<Date>2005-11-22T03:25+0000</Date>
<RatedBy>A345656565656I</RatedBy>
</Feedback>
<Feedback>
<Rating>5</Rating>
<Comment>Great, thanks for fast shipping!</Comment>
<Date>2005-11-21T14:52+0000</Date>
<RatedBy>A1212121212203</RatedBy>
</Feedback>This response snippet shows the sellers ID and nickname. Customer ratings of sellers are summarized by a number of stars where five stars is the best possible seller rating. The Rating element specifies a specific customer's rating of a seller. The AverageFeedbackRating specifies the average of all customer ratings of the seller. The TotalFeedback element specifies the number of customers that reviewed the seller.
In addition to the summary information, the Seller response group returns the content of all customer reviews. The preceding example shows the first two. As the number of customer reviews can be numerous, the FeedbackPage parameter can be used in the SellerLookup request to specify which page of ten reviews to return.
Summary information of all seller reviews is included in the glance page, which is returned by SellerLookup by default in the GlancePage element, for example:
<GlancePage>http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/seller/at-a-glance.html?seller=[Seller ID]&marketplaceSeller=1</GlancePage>The marketplaceSeller value of 1 (a boolean value representing True) specifies that the seller also sells in the Amazon marketplace. This means that you can find the seller's items for sale both on Amazon.com and on the seller's web site.
You can enter the GlancePage URL into a browser to see the seller's glance page, which summarizes, in tabular form, the number of positive and negative reviews of a seller. Amazon's retail web site displays the glance page information, part of which is shown in the following figure:
You can see from all of the examples presented in section that SellerLookup returns a significant amount of information about sellers. ItemSearch and ItemLookup requests can also return information about items sold by sellers but the information returned by SellerLookup, SellerListingSearch, and SellerListingLookup is more extensive.
