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Finding BrowseNodes for Amazon API search (AWS)

admin — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:56:44 +0000

So, I’ve been hitting the Amazon sites real hard over the last month. With a combination of ReviewAZON, WPReviewSite and my own amazon store script, I’ve been picking niches and working on traffic. Today, I was looking at one of my good performing EPN store fronts, and I wanted to include Amazon products in there as well. The problem I was having was getting it targeted to the sub category. I knew the SearchIndex, but couldn’t figure out how to get the proper BrowseNode of the sub category. The solution is to do a BrowseNodeLookup call.

To do this, you first need to determine the main BrowseNode, basically the number related to the main category where your product is located in. To get this number, you may be able to see it in the URL, or use this matrix to get the proper BrowseNode based off of country:

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSECommerceService/latest/DG/index.html?BrowseNodeIDs.html

Next, you need to query Amazon’s AWS and send this BrowseNode. You will receive a XML file containing all children related to this parent including name and BrowseNode.

Here is a basic function I wrote that will do a signed request for BrowseNodeLookup operation:

function find_browse_node_aws_signed_request($region, $params, $public_key, $private_key){
$method = "GET";
$host = "ecs.amazonaws.".$region;
$uri    = "/onca/xml";
$params["Service"]    = "AWSECommerceService";
$params["AWSAccessKeyId"] = $public_key;
$params["Timestamp"]    = gmdate("Y-m-d\TH:i:s\Z");
$params["Version"]    = "2009-03-31";
ksort($params);
$canonicalized_query = array();
foreach ($params as $param=>$value){
$param = str_replace("%7E", "~", rawurlencode($param));
$value = str_replace("%7E", "~", rawurlencode($value));
if($param == ‘ItemPage’ && $value == ‘x’){
$canonicalized_query[] = $param."=".$i;
}else{
$canonicalized_query[] = $param."=".$value;
}
}
$canonicalized_query = implode("&", $canonicalized_query);
$string_to_sign = $method."\n".$host."\n".$uri."\n".$canonicalized_query;
$signature = base64_encode(hash_hmac(‘sha256′, $string_to_sign, $private_key, true));
$signature = str_replace("%7E", "~", rawurlencode($signature));
$request = "http://".$host.$uri."?".$canonicalized_query."&Signature=".$signature;
$ch    = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $request);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return $response;
}

To call the function you would do something like this:

$resp = find_browse_node_aws_signed_request($country,
array("Operation"=>"BrowseNodeLookup",
"Service"=>"AWSECommerceService",
"BrowseNodeId"=>"111111111"
),
$pubKey,
$privKey);

$pubKey is your Associate Key ID (not your tracking ID) and the $privKey is your Secret AWS Key ID. You can do a var_dump($resp) to see the values of the returned array of values. After retrieving the BrowseNodeID, you can search within that category by passing ‘BrowseNode’ to your ItemSearch API call. Hope this helps!

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Thinking out loud about EPN Quality Click Pricing (QCP)

admin — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 03:05:04 +0000

So, I’ve been paying close attention to analytics and most importantly, my QCP preview in EPN reporting. Just like what it was stating for the end of August, my earnings will be looking really good under this model and I was trying to figure out why.

I really think the major benefit in my case is that I use limited PPC via YSM to promote my good earning niche sites. I never been too heavy in SEO, and relied on PPC to drive traffic to these sites. Finding the right balance of advertising cost with profits earned is tricky, but I think that is why my EPC is good on these sites. I’m driving ‘buyers’ to come to the site, and eventually ‘buy’ on eBay vs. driving a bunch of readers. I wrote a post about this in January 2008 “Readers vs. Buyers“.

Now, with this improvement with EPC, I think I’ll do some tests in October or November by ramping up my PPC campaigns to drive more quality traffic to eBay.

While I’m still waiting for the dust to settle, I’ve been working hard (hence the lack of recent posts) on creating Amazon store fronts, CJ based store fronts, hub support blogs to my various sites. I’ve been working on creating a new Amazon store front plugin, but I’ve been absolutely LOVING ReviewAzon. I can’t say enough how great this plugin is. If you’re interested in working on your Amazon affiliate efforts, please pick this plugin up. Only $79, you can’t afford to NOT try it.

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Understanding the Amazon Product Advertising API

admin — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 13:57:29 +0000

I’ve been working on some Amazon store fronts. With the recent chatter about the EPN Quality Click Pricing, I thought it would be good to focus on a few other sites while the dust settles. I have confidence that everything with EPN will work out, but this is a good reminder that one should stay diversified.

I’m basically working on a few things. The first priority was to get my existing sites working after the signed authentication change which happened on August 15th. The next priority was to find a new blog plugin that would handle Amazon products nicely. I found ReviewAzon, which fits my needs perfectly for posting products, but I needed a good ‘store front’ script or way to include this with my ReviewAzon sites.

I found Amazon Niche Store, which is free, and it looks similar to my various store fronts, but I wasn’t happy about the results being returned from the author’s server. So I figured I need to modify the plugin and do the lookup and presentation on my own. The author also displayed his tracking code 10% of the time (which he states). This was a fun project, since I’ve never worked on a plugin and it seems lately I’ve been doing a lot of WordPress stuff.

I wanted to state that finding good documentation about the Amazon AWS or Product Advertising API is somewhat difficult (not sure why), but since I found the proper docs, I wanted to post them here. The Product Advertising API Developer Guide is must have link if you’re going to be doing any work with the API, it gives you a complete run down of the Operations needed to ask the appropriate questions to Amazon and return products.

I was able to rewrite that plugin and include it within my ReviewAzon sites by creating a category ‘stores’ within the blogs. One immediate challenge I had with that plugin re-write was the ability of returning more than 10 products, which appears to be a very common problem. My solution, and not sure if it’s the best, is to loop through the requests to get multiple pages and adding them to a array. To save on additional calls I serialized the array and stored it in the WP options table based on keyword searched with a timestamp. If the timestamp is expired, it will do another lookup, etc.

If any of you have dealt with this in the past and has a better solution, please let me know!

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Review of ReviewAZON

admin — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 20:19:36 +0000

If you’ve been following this blog for some time, you would know I sort of have a love-hate relationship with Amazon’s affiliate program (Amazon Associates).

First of all, I love their site. I buy many things from Amazon, and it’s hard to beat the name trust you get with Amazon. I love that you can buy SO much stuff from there. Basically if you can think of it, it’s on Amazon. I love their affiliate management interface (except it updates every 24 hours), but getting reports, and tools is a snap. I love their API for pulling products (even though I was having trouble after their recent change for signed authentication). So that’s a lot of love….

The bad? Well, their cookie life is brutal. They only offer a one day cookie for earnings. That potential customer can’t “sleep on it”, and if they do, you get nadda. So it’s strictly related to impulse purchases only or you’re relying on them doing the research and are ready to buy when they go to your blog or store front. Tough. Their commission percentage is pretty low as well, and especially compared to other networks. You’ll hear arguments that you’ll make it up on the name trust, and that will convert to more sales, etc.

Bottom line is that I’ve tried promoting Amazon multiple times and have not had good luck. Is this Amazon’s fault? Is their network that bad? No. I’m definitely the weak link on this one. For whatever reason, I have not tapped into the proper targeted crowd for Amazon. I feel like I have a good feeling about EPN, but Amazon, I’m still reaching out in the dark.

Clearly, there are many individuals making excellent earnings with Amazon, so where did I gone wrong? I believe it was my approach. First of all, I’ve always intermixed Amazon with EPN sites, heavily promoting EPN, while loosely promoting Amazon. Also, I was working in niches that worked good with EPN. These niches may be producing naturally poorly with Amazon. I’ve also pursued store front style sites using Amazon’s API pulling ‘related’ products. Talking with few people that do well with Amazon (People, it’s important to talk to others and learn), and they seem to be having excellent results with blog / review type sites. Working the SEO organic long tail, etc. This was never my strategy with Amazon or EPN for that matter.

Today, I created two new WordPress blogs focusing on product review/blog angle related to products. This time, my focus in on Amazon with a small focus on EPN (only showing 2-3 auctions), etc.

To do this, I discovered a fantastic WordPress plugin called ReviewAZON. I cannot believe how cool this plugin is. First off, it’s already up-to-date with new Amazon authentication structure, so it’s good to go there. Below is a listing of product features advertised on their site.

Get Lifetime updates – Pay once and get lifetime updates and product enhancements for the life of the product.
Use ReviewAZON on UNLIMITED Domains! Buy it and use it on some or all of your domains.
Access to the ReviewAZON Support Forum: Join our community of ReviewAZON users and get the latest product updates, support information as well as user tips and tricks to make your blog a success!
ReviewAZON allows you to display over 25 different pieces of product content such as average customer rating, product description, customer reviews, pricing, brand, manufacturer, product details and more!
Detailed product user guide helps you every step of the way when it comes to installing, configuring and using the ReviewAZON WordPress plug-in. Also learn how to make your own custom templates quickly and easily.
Build complete blogs in a matter of hours instead of days or weeks allowing you to focus on other things such as promotion and creating additional blogs.
Easy to use and intuitive administrative tools make configuring ReviewAZON a snap!
Ajax driven product search dialog screen allows you to search by product category, custom sort parameter and product keywords to find just the products you are looking for quickly to add quality content to your blog in just minutes.
Support for all the Amazon Affiliate programs including Canada, United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany and Japan.
Flexible HTML templates let you control the output of Amazon data to your users with virtually unlimited ways to display pertinent and meaningful content to your blog readers.
Custom YouTube video search screen allows you to search for YouTube product reviews and add them to your blog to enhance the reader experience.
Display Product Accessories and Similar Product listings along side your product post pages by showing them in-line or by using the custom sidebar widgets that come out of the box with ReviewAZON.
Use the built in Custom Template Manager interface to make custom template changes on the fly and update all your blog posts with a single save!
Custom Template Token Reference tool allows you to see exactly what tokens are available for use with that particular template without having to reference the manual each time you make a change.
eBay integration with PhpBayLite or PhpBayPro enables you to display eBay listings along side the products you are promoting to help increase your ROI and affiliate commissions.
Built in custom Sidebar Widgets helps you to display information such as product Brands, Price Ranges and Featured Products to your customers to better help them find the information they need on your blog.
Use the built in Tabbed product listing interface to display product information to your users in a tab layout instead of the normal vertical layout.
SEO friendly image and product URLs can be configured to display human readable links that not only help your readers but also boost on page SEO for your blog.
Output Caching allows you to speed up the rendering of product content to your blog readers by reducing the load time and the number of calls to the Amazon web service.
Make your blog product content stand out by providing your readers with timely and informative customer reviews on the products you are promoting.
Continuously add product posts to your blog by “Drip Feeding” them over a defined set of time by using the Bulk Product Post feature of ReviewAZON. You can have products automatically post to your blog over the course of days, weeks and even months allowing you to focus on promotion rather than content creation.

What I particularily like is the buld search and post of Amazon products. Here you can create many blog entries (inserted in random times) to your blog (this is what they refer to as “Drip Feeding”). They also provide a YouTube review feature where you can search YouTube for related videos and include them with your post. Very cool. Also the ability to include actual Amazon reviews fills content quite nicely. You can edit content surrounding your Amazon fed posts as well to create a more personal review.

The eBay integration is great. I went with PHPBay Lite version for now, which provides more than enough control for what I”m trying to. Remember, I’m trying to focus on Amazon vs. EPN on these particular blogs.

If you’re looking for some quality Amazon integration for your WordPress blog, this could be the plugin for you! How effective has it been for me? Too soon to tell, but I’m very optimistic. I’ve changed my niches to more ‘commercial’ products and plan on working the long tail. The content definitely supplies a lot of keywords. My big concern is duplicate content penalties. My goal is to break up the content and insert as much as I can to help avoid this.

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