How can I get credit for amazon purchases coming from links on my website generated by the product advertising api?

Question

I'm using the Amazon product advertising api to search for amazon products and displaying a link to the product if its found. How can I get credit for a sell that comes from my website? I signed up for the Amazon Associates program but everywhere I look it seems like you have to "generate" these links and keep track of them and thats not really feasible when my app can potentially generate thousands of buy links... So I know theres got to be something I'm missing here. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

As you know, when you subscribe to the Amazon Product Advertising API program, you get an AssociateTag, and AccessKeyId and a secret key that is required to authenticate every request sent to Amazon.

So, when someone goes to your site, chooses an Amazon product (displayed on your site) and clicks on the "check out" link, you redirect that customer to Amazon site in order to let them handle the payment process. When the deal is done, Amazon knows that this sell came from your site (because the request to check out included your tag and key) and that's when you get some money from Amazon.

I hope this answers your problem.

Answer 2

You can check generated links on the US site and the UK site with their link checker tool. This will tell you if you get credit for purchases. It won't tell you if you get API credits.

The Product API is documented here - you should use the "DetailPageURL" response attribute for the URL.

You can build your own links like this, subbing in the correct values:

"http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/#{asin}/ref=nosim/#{uk_associate_id}"

Note - that URL is for the UK site. If you generate your own links, they won't count towards your API usage credit. See here for more details.

Hope that helps.