Common Product Data Elements

Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN)

The ASIN is the unique identifier for every item in the Amazon catalog. Since each locale has its own customized database, the ASIN used to identify a product in one locale is usually not the same for the other locales. ASINs are alphanumeric strings.

Title

The Title element is part of every ItemAttributes/ element returned by ECS. For books and music, this element contains the title of the work. For products like sporting goods or apparel, this element contains the name/short description of the product. For restaurants, this element contains the name of the restaurant.

Length

Length of the product package. Units of measurement are specified in the Units attribute, e.g., units="inches".

Width

Width of the product package. Units of measurement are specified in the Units attribute, e.g., units="inches".

Height

Height of the product package. Units are specified in the Units attribute, e.g., units="millimeters".

Weight

Weight of the product package. Units of measurement are specified in the Units attribute, e.g., units="hundredths-pounds" or Units="grams".

EAN

European Article Number, same as Japanese Article Number (JAN).

ISBN

International Standard Book Number

Merchant ID

US only. Merchants are large Amazon partners who fill orders from their own inventories and have an extensive presence on the Amazon Web sites.

Seller ID

Sellers are any vendor who sells any product on Amazon's Web sites, from individuals selling a few used books to major corporations.

Feature

The Feature element can occur multiple times per item element. It is used for various descriptive information. The values of this element are not standardized, but are different for different products, even within the same product lines.

UPC

Universal Product Code. US only.

A Note on Listing Product Creators

Some product descriptions include the names of the people involved in creating the product, including writers, editors, performers, composers, conductors, etc. A few of these product creator roles are described by specific XML elements, partly because of their pervasiveness and partly because of compatibility issues with previous versions of ECS. However, the list of creative roles is too long to implement as individual XML tags, so the Creator tag was implemented. Its form is:

<Creator Role="role">name</Creator>

For example

<Creator Role="Composer">Mozard</Creator>

Note that the Role attribute values have been translated into other languages, so on amazon.de, you will see Role="Dirigent" whereas the US/UK sites will have Role="Conductor".

Some common creator roles and their implementation in ECS

Standard child elements for Price Elements

Price data returned by ECS consists of elements that contain the following tags:

Child elements for price data returned by ECS