Amazon Item Lookup
One of our client uses the Amazon Ecommerce Web Service to lookup and dynamnically import Amazon items to thier website. I was having complains that some of the users were not able to find items on thier site using the ASIN, but those ASIN works on the Amazon website.
When debugging the issue, I found that the error returned for those ASIN search was “AWS.ECommerceService.ItemNotAccessible“. Searching for this on the web lead me to following Amazon Documentation page:
Okay, so the problem was that not all items displayed on the Amazon can be access or manipulated from the web-service. Though it was some thing new for me, but it does makes perfect sense as it’s usualy the case with external merchants.
Another interesting finding of the today was that one can easily use the REST (Representational State Transfer) for quick debugging. Like to test the XML response for the above query in the browser, I just need to paste the following:
http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService&Version=2005-03-23&Operation=ItemLookup&SubscriptionId=0525E2PQ81DD7ZTWTK82&ItemId=B0001XRS1K&MerchantId=All&ResponseGroup=OfferFullSo even though we are using the SOAP when calling the Amazon web-service, REST calls are much more simple for simple debugging and testing. What to know more about REST, here is a good start:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer
Still having problems understanding REST, then the following link would be of help 🙂
http://tomayko.com/articles/2004/12/12/rest-to-my-wife
Tags: Amazon, Item Lookup, REST, SOAP, Web Service
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on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 3:03 pm and is filed under ASP.Net.
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