Amazon Product Advertising API and Sales Rank
A Visual Studio C# application
The Amazon Product Advertising API allows you to connect to Amazon, then search and lookup product information such as price details, descriptions and so on. In conjunction with an Amazon Affiliate ID you can make money when a customer is referred to the Amazon site and purchases qualifying products.
This Visual Studio C# project gives some basic calls to illustrate how to collect data from Amazon.
Specifically, it allows you to retrieve Sales Rank information and save it to a text file.
I have been particularly interested in this as I wanted a way to monitor changes in Sales Rank and compare it with rival products.
The two important classes are ItemSearchRequestand ItemSearch Response.
ItemSearchRequest enables you to retrieve products with certain text in the title, while the ItemLookupRequest enables you to retrieve information about specific items.
To use the API you have get an Access Key ID and a Secret Access Key. The following web link describes how you do this:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSimpleQueueService/latest/SQSGettingStartedGuide/AWSCredentials.html
Once you have these, you need to modify the app.config file with these values.
Go through the app.config file and find any instances of accessKyeID and secretKey and paste in your values.
The source code for the application can be downloaded from here.
The C# code
This is a console type application which will display Sales Rank and other information for specific book or product items. In the product look up section, you can enter a number of product ids to list all the information one after the other.
