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.