Introduction to the Product Advertising API

Amazon has spent over ten years and hundreds of millions of dollars developing a world-class web service that millions of customers use every day. As a developer, you can build Product Advertising API applications that leverage this robust, scalable, and reliable technology. You get access to much of the data that is used by Amazon, including the items for sale, customer reviews, seller reviews, as well as most of the functionality that you see on www.amazon.com, such as finding items, finding similar items, displaying customer reviews, and product promotions. In short, Product Advertising API operations open the doors to Amazon's databases so that you can take advantage of Amazon's sophisticated e-commerce data and functionality. Build your own web store to sell Amazon items or your own items.

Best of all, Product Advertising API is free. By signing up to become a Product Advertising API developer, you join the tens of thousands of developers who are already realizing financial gains by creating Product Advertising API-driven applications and web stores. In 2006, Product Advertising API developers sold well over $600 million worth of items. Would you like a percentage of that revenue?

The ItemSearch function can take a wide variety of parameters that help narrow down the list of items to only those that match the customer's wishes. Response groups are included in requests either by default or explicitly. Response groups select from all of the item data return which to display. The Offer response group, for example, returns information about an item's offer, that is, it's price and availability.

Search indices are used to restrict a request to a certain portion of Amazon's database. The database, called the catalog, contains millions of items. Returning 100,000 items is not useful to the customer. So, request parameters, including the search index, are used to narrow the results to make them match the customer's expectation. For example, a Harry Potter book and the DVD of that book reside in different search indices. By specifying the search index, you return the information relevant to the customer's interest.

Requests are structured. Each has an endpoint, which is the URL of the Product Advertising API, webservices.amazon.com. Responses, by default, are returned in XML, which makes parsing the response easier.

One of the first and most common tasks a customer undertakes is searching for items to buy. They supply search parameters, such as if they are looking for a book, DVD, or article of clothing. This guide shows how to make a REST request in multiple computer languages that searches through Amazon's catalog of items and selects those that are related to the keywords entered on the command line. The response processing code assumes the items returned are books. The response is parsed so that the title, author, and price of the item are displayed.