Amazon Product Feeds
Even though Amazon provides Web Services to access product information, fetching large amounts of data, while feasible, not an acceptable solution. Like some of the other affiliate programs who provide ftp downloads, apparently Amazon does have such ftp downloads, but provides it to only a few affiliates. While it makes sense for a typical retailer to provide the entire download of their product data, with millions of items, it is perhaps simply not acceptable for Amazon either.
While some people want to make use of large volumes of the product data, there are others, who are just interested in small quantities of product data, but without the hassles of all the web services. Many things are possible with such simple product feeds, quick rearranging of an aStore and being able to do CPC marketing being a few examples. Spreadsheet analysis to identify the right set of products to promote is also another example.
There are scripts like MrRat that interact with web services and generate the search results into your website. However, if you are interested in just getting a list of products and their properties to do other things like the example mentioned above, and you are not a coder who can work with web services, then one option is the AAWS2PF (Amazon Associate Web Services 2 Product Feed). This program takes care of the web service calling, parsing the XML and finally simply put all the product information in a tab delimited format which can be opened in a spreadsheet for further analysis.
When I first read about product feeds, I didn’t know of the various ways those feeds can be used. Initially I used to think of them as a way to build a website to display all of them and that the reason to favor them over web services is the scalability. Based on how a few people are using the product feeds, realized that there are other ways they can be used.
