August 17, 2009
by admin
7 Comments
On August 15, 2009, all Product Advertising API developers were required to authenticate ALL calls using a hmac/sha256 signing token. For some reason, this was a major pain in the ass for me, but I finally got things to work. … Continue reading
July 13, 2009
by admin
0 comments
I manage a few servers dedicated solely to my affiliate marketing efforts. As part of my daily routine, I monitor logs and activity of those servers. I do this for to maintain a level of security, but I also do … Continue reading
June 7, 2009
by admin
0 comments
I had a few people email me about my Parsing XML CJ Product Feeds article regarding how to FTP the file to your server. You can use various FTP function depending on how your PHP is configured. I used wget to grab the files. It was easier to gather all of my feeds. To do this, you’ll need to use PHP’s exec() function to execute the wget program on the server (assuming you have access and permissions to use wget via script).
May 8, 2009
by admin
1 Comment
Looks like Amazon is making some changes to their API. First they’re changing the name to ‘Product Advertising API’, which is fine with me. But it looks like they’re changing how you make calls. Based on the email sent they’re requiring authentication with each API call. Not sure what kind of impact, if any, this will cause. They are implementing this change on May 11 and will finish up by August 15th.
I personally will want to wait until the last minute to ensure the bugs were worked out. Unfortunately, my earnings with Amazon are always low, so it’ll be hard to gauge if something is wrong after the roll out.
Here is a portion of the letter sent out to associates related to the API:
January 18, 2008
by admin
1 Comment
This is a small tutorial on how you can retrieve products from Amazon’s Associates Web Service. I’m not the biggest fan of Amazon’s affiliate program. The biggest reason is the one day cookie. I like programs that produce results, and I’ve always struggled with this program. When I talk to others that do have success, it definitely seems like you need a large volume of visitors, and it appears to be quite seasonally dependent.
Regardless, I wanted to show how you can make calls against their web service. The first step is to be a Amazon associate (https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/). Here you will get an associate tag (usually something-20). This allows you to receive commissions by creating widgets, etc. But we want to use the AWS (Amazon Web Service), so you must be a Amazon developer. So this step will involve us going to the Amazon Web Service web site (http://aws.amazon.com). After creating account you will need to create a token. Basically, this is a password used to login to Amazon’s web service. Look for a button on the upper right hand section called ‘Your Web Serices Account’, click on AWS Access Identifiers. Look for something down in the content called Access Key ID. You may need to generate them. To make the calls we’ll need the Access Key AND your Amazon associate tag.