Motivating Customers to Buy

Topics

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.

Recommending Items To Others

The Small response group, and its parent response groups, return a Tell Your Friend link that looks similar to the following:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/taf/B000IHL51S%3FSubscriptionId%3D1C36YNE9WHA6T34ADPR2%26tag%3Dws%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D386001%26creativeASIN%3DB000IHL51S

This link brings up an email so the customer can easily email a friend about the item.

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>

Shipping Options

Shipping options are generally spelled out in child elements of the OfferListing element. Those child elements include IsEligibleForPrime and IsEligibleForSuperSaverShipping. These boolean values specify whether an item is eligible for prime or super saver shipping, respectively. You cannot set these values; you can only use their values.