Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS) provides access to different types of content that customers create on the Amazon Web sites, including product and restaurant reviews, wish lists, and Listmania lists. You can retrieve content from specific Amazon customers using the CustomerContentLookup and CustomerContentSearch operations.
US only.
The CustomerContentSearch operation searches for customers by name or email address. You must specify either a name or an email address, but not both.
For example, the REST request below would search for customers named "Smith".
http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService &SubscriptionId=[ID] &Operation=CustomerContentSearch &Name=Smith
You can specify multiple names by separating them with URL-encoded spaces (%20) as shown in the REST request below which would search for John Smith.
http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService &SubscriptionId=[ID] &Operation=CustomerContentSearch &Name=Smith%20john
Note that capitalization and word order in the name are not significant.
The REST request below would search for a customer by email address.
http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService &SubscriptionId=[ID] &Operation=CustomerContentSearch &Email=jsmith@xyz.com
The CustomerContentSearch operation retrieves twenty customers at a time. If your search results in more than twenty customers, you can make multiple requests to retrieve additional blocks of twenty customers (pages). In the case of CustomerContentSearch, you can page through customers with the CustomerPage parameter as shown in the table below.
| Parameter | Default Page Num. | Items Per Page | Valid Values | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CustomerPage | 1 | 20 | 1..20 | Customers. Up to 20 pages of customers can be returned (20 per page). |
If this parameter is omitted, only the first page is returned. However the data also indicates the number of customers (and the number of pages) so that additional pages can be retrieved if desired.
US only.
The CustomerContentLookup operation returns only information that customers have chosen to make public on Amazon. No credit card, address, email, billing or transaction data is available. All that is available is (as permitted by the customer) their name, location (city/state), wish list ID, customer-written reviews, nickname and birthday.
Customer ID values are returned from customer operations like CustomerContentLookup, CustomerContentSearch, ListLookup and ListSearch as well as ItemSearch, ItemLookup and SimilarityLookup which include customer reviews, SellerListingSearch and SellerListingLookup which include customer feedback.
Amazon does not link a customer ID with any remote shopping carts that your application or Web site has created, and customer IDs cannot be used to search for shopping carts.
To look up a customer, submit a REST request that looks like the one shown below.
| US |
http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService
&SubscriptionId=[ID]
&Operation=CustomerContentLookup
&CustomerId=[ID]
|
By default, this returns basic customer information including location (city/state), name and nickname (as permitted by the customer).
You may request additional information by setting the ResponseGroup parameter. The ResponseGroup parameter for CustomerContentLookup has five allowed values:
For full customer information, you would thus submit a REST request like this:
http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService &SubscriptionId=[ID] &Operation=CustomerContentLookup &CustomerId=[ID] &ResponseGroup=Request,CustomerFull
The first ten customer-written reviews will be returned with this request. If Customer/TotalPages indicates the number of pages of reviews available, and if it is larger than one, you can see additional pages of feedback (with ten feedback records per page) by submitting additional REST requests like this:
http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService &SubscriptionId=[ID] &Operation=CustomerContentLookup &CustomerId=[ID] &ReviewPage=2
http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService &SubscriptionId=[ID] &Operation=CustomerContentLookup &CustomerId=[ID] &ReviewPage=3
You can see up to ten pages (100 total review entries, at ten per page) of reviews.