Money-Code » store fronts

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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Amazon Product API: SignatureDoesNotMatch error response

admin — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 04:18:21 +0000

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.

If you’re having trouble, and you’re using PHP5, this may help you.

The first item you’ll need is the ‘secret’. You need to log into the Amazon Web Services area (https://developer.amazonwebservices.com). After logging in (assuming you already have a account if you’re using their API), you need to hover over ‘Your Account’, and click ‘Access Identifiers’. Here you will see ‘Access Key ID’ and ‘Secret Access Key’. We’ll be referring Access Key ID as the public key and Secret Access Key as the private key in a function provided below. Copy these two values and add them to your code somewhere.

You will need to ensure that PHP is built with hash support. You can verify this with by view info (). If hash support is there we can use the built in hash_hmac() function. The concept is pretty straight forward (eventhough, I’ve been fighting it all night prior to this post). You create a string, and ‘hash’ it with our private key, then we pass the string to Amazon’s API, and they hash the same string with our private key. The value should be the same, and if so, we’re good. If something is off any where in that sequence you’ll be getting the dreaded ‘SignatureDoesNotMatch‘ message in your XML return.

I came across Ulrich Mierendorff’s function for sending a signed AWS request on the developer forum, and it was the only PHP code snippet that worked for me, so I need to pass it on. Below is the function:

function aws_signed_request($region, $params, $public_key, $private_key)
{
/*
Copyright (c) 2009 Ulrich Mierendorff

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a
copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"),
to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation
the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense,
and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the
Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL
THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING
FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER
DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
*/

/*
Parameters:
$region – the Amazon(r) region (ca,com,co.uk,de,fr,jp)
$params – an array of parameters, eg. array("Operation"=>"ItemLookup",
"ItemId"=>"B000X9FLKM", "ResponseGroup"=>"Small")
$public_key – your "Access Key ID"
$private_key – your "Secret Access Key"
*/

// some paramters
$method = "GET";
$host = "ecs.amazonaws.".$region;
$uri = "/onca/xml";

// additional parameters
$params["Service"] = "AWSECommerceService";
$params["AWSAccessKeyId"] = $public_key;
// GMT timestamp
$params["Timestamp"] = gmdate("Y-m-d\TH:i:s\Z");
// API version
$params["Version"] = "2009-03-31";

// sort the parameters
ksort($params);

// create the canonicalized query
$canonicalized_query = array();
foreach ($params as $param=>$value)
{
$param = str_replace("%7E", "~", rawurlencode($param));
$value = str_replace("%7E", "~", rawurlencode($value));
$canonicalized_query[] = $param."=".$value;
}
$canonicalized_query = implode("&", $canonicalized_query);

// create the string to sign
$string_to_sign = $method."\n".$host."\n".$uri."\n".$canonicalized_query;

// calculate HMAC with SHA256 and base64-encoding
$signature = base64_encode(hash_hmac(‘sha256′, $string_to_sign, $private_key, True));

// encode the signature for the request
$signature = str_replace("%7E", "~", rawurlencode($signature));

// create request
$request = "http://".$host.$uri."?".$canonicalized_query."&Signature=".$signature;

// do request
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $request);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

if ($response === False)
{
return False;
}
else
{
// parse XML
$pxml = simplexml_load_string($response);
if ($pxml === False)
{
return False; // no xml
}
else
{
return $pxml;
}
}
}

To call the function you create a array of arguments and pass it to the function along with the keys values.

$amazontag = ‘asdfasfd-20′;
$public_key = "asfdasdfasdfasfdasfda";
$private_key = "SECRETKEYasfdasdfasdfasfdasfda";
$param = array("Operation"=>"ItemSearch",
"IdType"=>"ASIN",
"MerchantId"=>"All",
"ResponseGroup"=>"Large",
"SearchIndex"=>$searchindex,
"BrowseNode"=>$BrowseNode,
"Keywords"=>$safeQuery,
"AWSAccessKeyId"=>$amazontag);
$xml = aws_signed_request("com",$param, $public_key, $private_key);

This worked perfectly for me, and got my Amazon sites back on line. Hope this helps!!

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