A new product was recently released by Amazon to its Associates network. The product allows less technical associates to easily create an entire online store using the extensive Amazon catalog. Amazon claims that “No programming is necessary” for usage of this new utility. It comes built in with a shopping cart, and the users are only taken to Amazon for final checkout.

From the Amazon Associates area:

“aStore by Amazon is a new Associates product that gives you the power to create a professional online store, in minutes and without the need for programming skills, that can be embedded within or linked to from your website.”

Some of the capabilities include: Ability to Feature Certain Amazon Products and Ability to Show Product Details, Reviews, and Pricing Information. Associates can find more information and read the full details next time they login to the Amazon Associate Area.  Although tons of Amazon Associate sites already exist, this should be ideal for niche sites featuring specific products.

[tags]Amazon, Amazon.com, Amazon Web Services, Amazon Associates, aStore, E-Commerce[/tags]

“True to the site’s name, there’s a list of secret deals and also a so-called “tag cloud” of coupons. You can post any product to Digg or to Delicio.us.

Interestingly enough, Mark told me that the lowest priced vendor doesn’t always get the sale. There’s a strong preference toward Amazon among his user base. That’s good to hear, and there are undoubtedly many reasons for this. I’ll take a guess at a few. First, people are loathe to create yet another online account. Second, they would like to deal with a known entity where possible. Third, they have probably had some positive experiences with Amazon in the past — an easy shopping and buying experience, on-time shipping, and responsive customer service…”

Take a minute and read the full post over at the AWS Blog.

[tags]aws, amazon web services, secretprices, brand loyalty[/tags]

Amongst them listed is Frucall, a free phone service that allows in-store price comparison. See my older posts here and here about the service.

[tags]frucall, amazon api, amazon web services[/tags]

“It appears that this deals site is using hReview markup in their product pages and getting indexed in the Reviews section of Technorati’s fairly new Microformats Search. I would say that this looks like quite a nice site normally. Unfortunately, the issue is that they use the Amazon.com API for data (as do many) and the way they’ve marked it up, all they do is round up Amazon’s average rating for the product, use the title of the product to markup the name (item fn), attempt to have the amazon user reviews in the “description” field, sneak in the “type” field of product with an abbr near the bottom of the page, and have a link that just links back to Dealazon’s own product page” (Read Full Entry)

So basically, my take from his entry, and from what I see is that Dealazon is submitting Amazon user reviews to Technorati and passing them as their own? (See example here) Why? Free traffic I assume. Not sure if telling people about this is a good idea or not since most will do about anything to get more traffic these days! I knew that this could be done a while ago. Tech.yahoo.com uses its own web services and marks up user reviews in hReview format… So what is to stop other sites from doing the same?

Its tempting to me to test this and see what kind of traffic is gained from this type of activity. However, Shopping.com makes you markup the Epinions reviews in a certain fashion. Amazon and Yahoo! may eventually want to follow this method too.

The trouble in doing this is duplicate content being submitted to aggregators. Duplicate content with no value-added is looked down upon by the majority of the Internet community and rightly so. It is not practical and not effeicient.

So those of you interested in structured blogging, I’ll let you decide. Is this an ethical practice for an affiliate or should the link always be back to the main review source?

[tags]technorati, pingerati, dealazon, reviews, hreviews, microformats, structured blogging, dulicate content, amazon, web services[/tags]

Here are some of them (information from ProgrammableWeb):

• The Amazing Baconizer
  Connecting a million popular culture dots via the Amazon API. Describe two items and see how they’re linked by consumer preference via intermediate items. Choose from books, CDs, or films, and you can mix and match.
• ActorTracker
  ActorTracker takes feeds of upcoming television shows, movies and celebrity news combined into a shopping experience with merchandise from Amazon and eBay.
• AmazonHive
  Alternative interface into the Amazon catalog. Java applet with price sliders and other filtering tools.

I haven’t had much time yet, but will look into them over the next few weeks. You can view all mashups that utilize the Amazon API listed in the ProgrammableWeb database here.

For developers .NET developers, you can jump start mashup development with the AmazonCommerceService.NET by Ed Quinn. More information from a recent post by Jeff Barr…

“AmazonCommerceService.NET is a set of .NET classes. It creates REST requests for ECS and then queues them up, dispatching them to Amazon at the rate of 1 request per second per the license agreement. The results are delivered asychronously as they arrive, using a delegate. Batched requests are supported.”

The source code is C# and framework is .NET 2.0. Also, Microsoft users can get the AmazonCommerceService.NET MSDN Compiled Help. For more information see Jeff’s his full post.

The last good ASP.NET implementation I saw was in a web application called StorePerfect for ECS 3.0, a few years ago. I will report further on this one once I have loaded the sample up and given it a whirl. My question to Ed, and maybe this is silly, but why was REST was choosen over SOAP?

[tags]ASP.NET, mashups, Amazon, Amazon ECS, Amazon Web Services[/tags]