Motivating Customers to Buy

One of the great benefits of shopping on Amazon is the wealth of reviews of both items and sellers.

All of these features, in Product Advertising API, are read-only, that is, it is possible to retrieve reviews but not possible to create new reviews or lists.

Getting Editorial Reviews

The EditorialReviews response group provides the merchant's description of an item. This information is less of a review and more of a product description. The content of the EditorialReviews response group can be displayed individually as part of an ItemLookup, ItemSearch, or SimilarityLookup request.

For books, Editorial Reviews is a separate listing on the DetailPageURL web page. For example,

The following XML snippet shows part of the equivalent Product Advertising API EditorialReview response.

<EditorialReview>
  <Source>Bookwire, April 07, 2006</Source>
  <Content>——Rich characters, unexpected plot development,and underlying themes of hope, lofty ideals, educational excellence, and historical pride.</Content>
</EditorialReview>

The Editorial Reviews section also contains the author's description of the book.

Getting Customer Reviews

The Reviews response group provides an iframe URL that contains customer reviews for a specified item.

Important

The content of the Reviews response group must be periodically updated as it expires in 24 hours.

The reviews are returned in the "Customer Reviews" section on the DetailPageURL web page, as shown in the following figure.

The following XML snippet shows part of the equivalent Product Advertising API Customer Reviews response returned by an ItemLookup or ItemSearch request.

<ItemLookupResponse>
	<Items>
		<Item>
			<ASIN>0316067938</ASIN>
			<CustomerReviews>
				<IFrameURL>
				http://www.amazon.com/reviews/iframe?akid=[AWS Access Key ID]&asin=0316067938&exp=2011-08-01T17%3A54%3A07Z&linkCode=xm2&summary=0&tag=ws&truncate=256&v=2&sig=[Signature]
				</IFrameURL>
			</CustomerReviews>
		</Item>
	</Items>
</ItemLookupResponse>

After you receive the IFrameURL in the Customer Reviews response, you can embed it into an HTML page. For example:

<iframe src="http://www.amazon.com/reviews/iframe?akid=[AWS Access Key ID]&asin=0316067938&exp=2011-08-01T17%3A54%3A07Z&linkCode=xm2&summary=0&tag=ws&truncate=256&v=2&sig=[Signature]" />

Important

Each iframe URL is valid for 24 hours. If the iframe URL expires, you will receive a 403 Forbidden error code.

The Small response group, and its parent response groups, return a Tell Your Friend link that looks similar to the following:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/taf/B000IHL51S%3FSubscriptionId%3D%26tag%3Dws%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D386001%26creativeASIN%3DB000IHL51S 

This link brings up an email so the customer can easily email a friend about the item.

A great way to spur add-on sales is by presenting customers with newly released items that are similar to items in their shopping cart. The CartNewReleases response group enables you to do this. This response group works with most cart operations.

The CartNewReleases response group returns the ASINs and titles of the top five new releases in the root category of the item specified in the cart operation. For example, when adding a television to a cart the top five new releases in the root category, electronics, are returned.

In the following request, an item is added twice to a newly-created shopping cart.

http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?
Service=AWSECommerceService&
AWSAccessKeyId=[AWS Access Key ID]&
AssociateTag=ws&
Operation=CartCreate&
Item.1.ASIN=B000062TU1&
Item.1.Quantity=2&
ResponseGroup=CartNewReleases
&Timestamp=[YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssZ]
&Signature=[Request Signature]

The response includes a new release from the root product category.

<NewReleases>
  <NewRelease>
    <ASIN>B00005JOFQ</ASIN>
    <Title>Brokeback Mountain (Widescreen Edition)</Title>
  </NewRelease>
</NewReleases>

Shipping options are generally spelled out in child elements of the OfferListing element. One such child element is IsEligibleForSuperSaverShipping, a boolean value that specifies whether an item is eligible for super saver shipping. You cannot set this value; you can only use the value.