Amazon's retail browse nodes allow us to dynamically categorize every Amazon ASIN into one or more categories. Browse nodes themselves are also categorized. For example, within the Amazon.com Books browse nodes, there is a node for each top-level Subject (Arts & Photography, Biographies & Memoirs, Business & Investing, Children's Books, etc.). There are also nodes for each book Format (Accessories, Audio CDs, Audiocassettes, etc.). A single ASIN may appear in a Subject node, Format node, or Brand node.
For several reasons, some categories of browse nodes are not accessible via Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS). For example, some ASINs are associated with browse nodes only temporarily; ECS cannot access these associations. The browse nodes that fall in this category are extremely dynamic and the ASINs associated with them change daily or even hourly.
The following pages provide lists of some of our more popular browse nodes and the search indexes with which you are most likely to use them.
The browse structure is the way that Amazon.com organizes products into subjects and categories on our site so that customers can find the product they want easily and efficiently. A browse ID is a number that corresponds to a general subject area of Amazon.com. (For example, the browse ID for the cookbooks category on Amazon.com is 6).
To find browse IDs at Amazon.com, the best way is to visit the "browse" area of the various product lines on our web sites. When you find a browse area that you would like to use to refine your search requests, look at the web page URL. The browse ID should appear after the string /tg/browse/-/ in some URLs and in the query string of URLs containing gp/browse.html. Here are some examples of URLs that contain browse IDs:
| URL | Comments |
|---|---|
http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=30 |
The browse node is 30 |
http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=5 |
The browse node is 5 |
http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=3890411 |
The browse node is 3890411 |
http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=1044440 |
The browse node is 1044440 |